Timothy Snyder on humiliating Russia while ignoring nuclear war threats
Timothy Snyder on humiliating Russia while ignoring nuclear war threats
Timothy Snyder is a good historian1 and has important insights on how democracies descend into authoritarian non-democracies2.
But he also has some blind spots. He has been criticized, for instance, for sloppy comparisons of Hitler and Stalin, a major historical minefield.3
He takes a hardline anti-Russia position on Ukraine, and seemingly everything else to do with Russia, too. And he takes what we could generally call a quirky position on nuclear war, i.e., that we basically shouldn’t worry about it.
Nicolai Petro recently gave this description of the Ukraine’s preferred narrative on the war:
The official Ukrainian narrative about the war goes more or less like this: In an effort to end Ukraine’s existence as a state, Russia launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Testing the waters, before that, Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the sole reason for today’s conflict is Moscow’s military intervention, which is part of a larger effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconstitute the USSR.4
Snyder is on board with that concept/slogan.
In the video below5, he approves of the description that Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin gave (in Snyder’s telling) of Russia’s invasion as being simply a scheme to grab Ukraine’s assets and put them under the control of Russian oligarchs. He describes this in basically a sneering tone, saying that Prigozhin’s statement about the Ukraine war during his brief march on Moscow act is:
… a very precious moment, and that is when a Russian leader tells the truth. So we have to get to seize and to snatch and we have to emphasize those moments becaquse they are few and far between. The moment when Prigozhin told the truth about what the war is actually about strikes me as being incredibly important. Not because it’s insightful but actually because it’s so obvious. A’nd we’ve spent so much time as the so-called collective West debating the ridiculous motivations which Putin put out for the war, which range from the completely implausible to the outright contradictory.
There’s nothing wrong with a historian also being a partisan for a cause he believes is right. But it’s worth noting that Snyder has even headed a fundraising campaign to provide military equipment to Ukraine, “to fund a ‘Shahed hunter’, an anti-drone system to detect enemy devices and jam signals, with the aim of destroying the weapons in the sky.”6
But whatever role Prigozhin may have had in shaping Russia’s Ukraine policy, his mercenary army is known for being particular brutal and murderous and not too worried about the niceties of any laws governing the conduct of soldiers in war. And he’s also essentially a career criminal. His outburst that so impressed Snyder was more likely a momentary slogan from an exceptionally thuggish character, not a considered statement about Russian policy.
Ivan Krastev, who is the other partner in that discussion, actually describes a different assumption about the intentions behind that war, without directly refuting Snyder’s. (Krastev’s comments in that presentation are generally more substantive and informative than Snyder’s.)
In an interview just published in German by Austria’s Der Standard, Snyder had this to say:
This war is a normal one, but we [the West] had a lot of abnormal ideas about it beforehand. For example, the assumption that there are profound explanations behind Russia's actions and Putin's motives. Russia is fighting this war to destroy Ukraine, to get hold of its resources, to kill the Ukrainian elite. These are things that have been defined as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity since the mid-20th century. We wanted to believe that this war was something unusual, that it was somehow about NATO or the psychology of Putin, but it was only about the conquest and destruction of one country by another.7 [my emphasis]
Which is basically just saying that Russia is evil and aggressive and also very evil and that’s why they attacked Ukraine and it is no kind of remotely normal nation that weighs threats and opportunities in its geopolitical situation, not even on its own borders.
Standard Cold War good-vs.-evil/Democracies-vs.-Autocracies rhetoric, in other words.
Even the element that “Russia is fighting this war to destroy Ukraine” is at best speculative. It’s much more plausible that their main goal is wreck Ukraine’s ability to be a viable member of NATO. Even their initial invasion strategy in 2022 looked more like an attempt to seize the capital city and set up a puppet government, leaving much of central and western Ukraine as a weak rump state. So far as I’m aware, and for what it is worth, to date Russia has not actually said it wants to destroy Ukraine or annex all of it. Or that it wants to reconstitute the USSR.
The polemic definition of “genocide” in situations like this seems to have become so inflated that any country that is invaded can immediately claim the invader is committing genocide. And for the country being attacked, making that claim has a very practical advantage, which is that the United Nations recognizes an official “responsibility to protect”8 in cases of a genocide in progress that the invaded country can invoke to demand direct outside intervention.
He also has a dubious theory about how the relative stability in Europe since 1945 happened, and uses it as an argument for why Putin has to be defeated, though it’s far from clear just what would constitute an adequate defeat in his eyes.
Europeans believe that there is a peaceful European order. But that's not true. They have a post-imperial order based on defeat. Austria today is this wonderful country [it is now] because it lost a war, because the Third Reich lost. Peace didn't just happen. A defeat has happened. Just as France lost in Algeria in 1962, the Netherlands in Indonesia in 1948, Belgium in the Congo, and Portugal and Spain in Africa. It was the defeats of empires that allowed the European project to exist and flourish. For decades, Europeans have been telling themselves that Russia is peaceful. It is not. Russia is losing its imperial war [in Ukraine]. And in order for the European project to continue, the Europeans must help Russia lose its imperial war.9
He discusses this idea in the video, too.
(Just to be clear, European countries were very aware of Russia’s two Chechen wars, their interventions in Georgia and Syria, their military mischief in African, and, of course, the pre-2022 seizures of territory in Ukraine. They may have been over-optimistic, but they weren’t blind.)
Snyder also has some striking views on the risks of nuclear war in the current conflict. He thinks concern about nuclear war is basically a “fantasy of omnipotent submission” among people who worry about such things.10 He devotes an essay to arguing why the US and everyone else should basically ignore any nuclear threats. And even literally aruges that the fact that Russia makes a nuclear threat is proof that it has no intention whatsoever of using nukes.
In both the global and the Ukrainian settings, the Russian calculation is that nuclear talk will induce Europeans and North Americans to deter themselves from sending weapons. But deploying talk is very different from deploying weapons. Indeed, it is an alternative to doing so. We too easily assume that the word must be the antecedent to the deed. But the word is the deed. When deploying nuclear talk is the policy, then actually deploying a nuclear weapon undoes the policy. The implied threat is no longer available, once used. [my emphasis]11
At best, this is quite a convoluted understanding of the risks of nuclear war.
Also in the video presentation above, he also talks about what he thinks of nuclear war risks. He seems to be basing his rather Pollyannish view on the fact that so far - at least since 1945 - no nuclear power has used a nuke in wars even when it was losing. Like with the US in Vietnam, or the USSR in Afghanistan.
It’s notable that it is generally assumed - rightly so - that a key element in the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the recognition by President Kennedy that he needed to provide some kind of face-saving way for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to back out of the situation. Khrushchev also gave Kennedy a face-saving gift by agreeing to keep secret the concession the US had made on nuclear missiles in Türkiye so it wouldn’t be used by Republicans in the 1962 Congressional elections. “The crisis ended when Khrushchev capitulated and withdrew missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy’s public promise to not invade the island and a secret agreement to withdraw American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.”12
But Snyder in the Standard interview argues that the kind of defeat the West needs to inflict on Russia should involve humiliation. “French President Emmanuel Macron and many in the West believe that Putin cannot be humiliated. But, of course, we can humiliate Putin!”
Which I guess makes sense if you actually believe that since Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons means there is no chance he will use them.
Otherwise, it’s just bluster.
Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion. YaleCourses YouTube channel. (Accessed: 2023-16-07). There are 23 classes in this series, all available on YouTube.
Snyder, Timothy (2017): On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books. <https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies> (Accessed:
Kaiser, Menachem (2012): Unshared Histories: Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands". Los Angeles Review of Books 10/16/2012. <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unshared-histories-timothy-snyders-bloodlands/> (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
Lazare, Daniel (2014): Timothy Snyder’s Lies. Jacobin 09/09/214. <https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies> (Accessed: 2023-10-07).
Petro, Nicolai (2023): Russia, Ukraine, and Lasting Peace in Europe. TPQ: Transatlantic Policy Quarterly 03/01/2023 . <http://turkishpolicy.com/article/1183/russia-ukraine-and-lasting-peace-in-europe> (Accessed: 2023-16-07). On other points, Petro gives a too-superficial description of the Russian separatists and their relationship to Moscow.
German version: Petro, Nicolai (2023): Verdammt zum ewigen Konflikt mit Russland? Makroskop 28.06.2023. <https://makroskop.eu/22-2023/verdammt-zum-ewigem-konflikt-mit-russland/> (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Future of the World. IVMVienna YouTube channel 06/26/2023. <https://www.youtube.com/live/rqCGUVYkcmM?feature=share> (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
Rankin, Jennifer (2022): ‘Russia wins by losing’: Timothy Snyder on raising funds for Ukrainian drone defence. The Guardian 11/28/2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/28/russia-wins-by-losing-timothy-snyder-on-raising-funds-for-ukrainian-drone-defence> (Accessed 2023-16-07)
Snyder, Timothy & Sommavilla, Fabian (2023): Timothy Snyder: "Natürlich können wir Putin demütigen". Der Standard 14.07.2023. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000178768/timothy-snyder-natuerlich-koennen-wir-putin-demuetigen> (Accessed: 2023-16-07). My translation from the German.
The Rise and Fall of the Responsibility to Protect. Council on Foreign Relations website, n/d. <https://world101.cfr.org/how-world-works-and-sometimes-doesnt/building-blocks/rise-and-fall-responsibility-protect> (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
Snyder & Sommavilla, op.cit.
Snyder, Timothy (2023): Nuclear war! Thinking about … Substack newsletter 02/08/2023. (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
Ibid.
Radchenko, Sergey & Zubok, Valdislav (2023): Blundering on the Brink. Foreign Affairs 102:3 May-June 2023), 45.