The Situation: On Shame

The Situation on Tuesday and Friday detailed the string of incompetently malevolent inanities that have characterized the government’s conduct in the James Comey case.

Today I want to talk about shame. 

I am unaccustomed to feeling shame at my country.

Perhaps it was coming of age right as the Soviet Union collapsed and so much of the world found itself suddenly free under the pax americana that trained me to a certain muscle memory of the essential goodness of American power.

Perhaps it was watching a certain set of genocides—in the former Yugoslavia, in particular—never fully get off the ground, or be stopped in their tracks, that reinforced the idea that the absence of American intervention can be far more dangerous than the careful application of it. I’m honestly not sure where it came from.

But I managed to get through the 1990s without feeling shame at my country—just occasional frustration that we didn’t do more or sooner. And this was not hard.

I also managed to get through the Global War on Terror without much shame. And this was harder. Sure, the Iraq invasion was a fiasco, one that cost thousands of American lives—and countless Iraqi lives. And yes, our policies had excesses which bled into barbarities at times. But the Iraq war had the best of intentions behind it. And the excesses of counterterrorism policy were problems to be managed, outrages to be brought under control in the context of a broader policy I actually believed in. So I worked on the problems, and I took pride in the bigger picture. 

Ten months of The Situation has me in a different place.

Shame is a complex emotion—or, rather, a complex set of emotions. And I have experienced a bunch of different shames at different times over the last few months.

There is the shame, for example, of America’s sudden abandonment of people who depend on it around the world for the most basic health care goods. I honestly don’t know how to read the work of Brooke Nichols and her team at Boston University on the excess mortality associated with USAID funding cuts without shame. In case you’re interested, the team is estimating that about 600,000 people have died so far as a result of these cuts, which amounts to 88 deaths per hour.

About two-thirds of the dead are children.

And sure, maybe Dr. Nichols’s methodology is imperfect. And maybe she is thus overstating things. And if you’re inclined to be dismissive because that number involves a whole lot of dead kids, maybe you can hypothesize some political bias on her part—though I certainly know of none.

So let’s discount it by 20 percent, or 50 percent, or 70 percent. And let’s imagine that it’s “only” 300,000 needless deaths, or 100,000. And let’s imagine that none of them are kids. Do you feel better? I don’t.

Because our government set out to destroy a federal agency whose work was keeping a lot of people alive all over the world. It did so effectively. And now a lot of people are dying. This was both foreseeable and foreseen.

And perhaps you don’t believe that America should have ever been in the foreign aid business in the first place and you think that getting out of it was the right policy given this country’s fiscal situation—even though foreign aid cost a fraction of one percent of the country’s budget and destroying it the way the administration did actually doesn’t save money. And if you believe these things, you still have to grapple with the way this was done. Which is to say that it was a conscious decision to deprive people of the aid on which their lives depended with no notice or real opportunity for others to step in and compensate.

So no, it wasn’t murder. It’s a little too indirect for that. But it was a kind of willful mass killing, which is to say that it wasn’t not murder either.

And what is the morally serious person to feel when confronted with the willful mass killing of children by deliberate acts of the policy of his country—even if it is indirect, even if it were to turn out that Dr. Nichols’s methodology overstates the morbidity? 

There is anger, yes. There is indignance. There is a feeling of helplessness.

There is also shame. This kind of shame is a feeling that our leadership did something reckless and did so in a fashion that could not have been calculated to be more damaging—that there is something needless about the suffering our government willfully and intentionally inflicted.

And perhaps you don’t share this particular shame, because you don’t believe these deaths are really happening, or because you don’t believe they were America’s job to stop anyway, or because you think USAID is actually doing woke stuff.

But this is not actually an essay about USAID. So let’s talk about some cases where the word “murder” applies a little more directly. And let’s talk about a different kind of shame—the kind where one has to reconsider one’s own conduct and prior positions.

When I watch the Venezuelan boat strikes, I feel personally implicated. 

Because I am a person who supported drone strikes against legitimate counterterrorism targets. I advocated for them.

And how is the morally serious person supposed to react when the legal theories he advocated to protect American lives get contorted to justify the projection of force against civilian boats?

How is he to react when, if he is remotely honest with himself, he remembers the faint contempt with which he regarded his ACLU colleague-antagonists when they insisted that the arguments he defended put America on a slippery slope to a government that could do anything?

What is the morally serious person supposed to feel when he remembers the confidence with which people like him argued that the slippery slopes had notches on them wouldn’t justify attacks on civilians or in countries with functioning law enforcement apparatuses? 

And how is one supposed to feel when he realizes that all those clever legal theories he developed or championed or argued for were just toilet paper with which a malevolent president and secretary of defense would go into their bathrooms and wipe their asses?

Well, there’s anger, yes. There’s indignance. There is a feeling of helplessness. And there’s a feeling of foolishness roughly approximate to finding out you’ve given your money to a person named Ponzi. 

But there’s also this shame. And this shame is personal. It’s not the shame of what our government does in one’s name. It’s the shame of how one helped.

But this essay is not about boat strikes either. Indeed, while I have some expertise in war powers and strikes on non-state actors, and while I have extremely strong feelings about the subject, this is an essay about still a different kind of shame. 

This is an essay about Ukraine. 

If that sounds like a bit of a non sequitur given my lengthy preamble on other subjects, pause and consider the infamy with which our nation is flirting right now. A Ukrainian friend here in Washington texted me on Friday, “I am trying not to think about whether my uncle’s life was lost in vain; or whether I will ever see my family again.” Another, only a few hours ago, sent me the poster for the movie “Don’t Look Up”—a sardonic comedy about a coming asteroid impact that will end the world—with the note, “Feeling like I’m in this movie.”

These are not histrionics.

The current policy of the Trump administration is to impose upon Ukraine a “peace” arrangement with Russia that amounts to a full capitulation to many of Russia’s most maximalist demands. It’s not just territory. It’s forswearing defensive alliances. It’s domestic legal and constitutional changes. It’s the theft of natural resources. It would leave Ukraine defenseless against future Russian attack and domination. And that is, of course, the point. 

The “deal” would require Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and require NATO countries to reject Ukrainian membership. It would actually require domestic constitutional change of Ukraine to foreclose NATO membership. It would preclude NATO members even from stationing troops in Ukraine on their own. 

Its so-called security guarantees to Ukraine do not include considering an attack on Ukraine to be tantamount to an attack on other countries.

It would require a 25 percent reduction in the size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, though Ukraine was the party attacked militarily both in 2014 and in 2022. It would require no reduction of Russian forces. 

It would relieve sanctions on Russia. In fact, it would allow Russia to steal 50 percent of the energy from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, a power plant that sits in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia.

Indeed, the United States would recognize seized Ukrainian territory as Russian—and Ukraine would actually be required to withdraw from more of its own territory, which would be recognized internationally as Russian.

The “deal” would actually require that Ukraine hold elections within a specified period of time, as though the performance of Ukrainian domestic democracy had anything whatsoever to do with the advent of its most recent conflict with its highly authoritarian neighbor. 

If all of this sounds like Neville Chamberlain and Czechoslovakia, please be fair to Chamberlain. The true face of Hitler’s monstrousness was not yet apparent when Chamberlain sold out the Czechoslovaks at Munich. The comparison would only be fair if Chamberlain, after Munich and the subsequent occupation of the rump and defenseless remains of the state, had continued letting Hitler swallow up other countries. And this he did not do. Britain, after all, went to war over Poland. 

Trump, by contrast, knows exactly who Vladimir Putin is—and he knows it today. We have been to Munich and back with Putin under a number of presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump himself in his first term incarnation. And the years of our appeasement of Putin helped prompt Putin’s frankly genocidal policy in Ukraine—much as one might have expected it to and as far-sighted intellectuals and politicians did, in fact, expect it to.

Whatever folly all this may have entailed—and it did involve a gross and bipartisan folly—such anticipatory appeasement is profoundly different from active collusion with a genocidal war of destruction and domination once that war has already been raging for four years. Trump has been colluding with Putin for many years, on a variety of issues—and yes, I am using that most provocative of words, “collusion,” very intentionally. This deal is the ultimate expression of that collusion. It is collusion in the physical destruction of Ukraine.

For reasons I do not purport to understand, Trump has looked at the two sides of this conflict, and at their respective demands of one another, and he has not seen that one is a violent, imperialistic autocracy and the other is a flawed democracy (and all democracies are flawed) fighting for its life—or maybe he has seen that and he enjoys that fact.

For whatever reason, he has found that the fundamental problem in this conflict is that Russia is not being adequately permitted to dominate and destroy Ukraine. And this “deal” is Trump’s policy effort to rectify this problem.

Which is another way of saying that he has reoriented American policy to support—rather than to oppose—that domination and destruction.

Now this reorientation is not—like, say, encouraging the deaths of 600,000 people who were benefiting from USAID health programs—merely a predictable collateral consequence of a policy aimed at a theatrical display of saving money and terrorizing federal government workers domestically.

Nor is it a mere chest-thumping display of violence, like killing a few civilians on boats, designed to impress voters with displays of performative machismo and “lethality” like some ape with a TikTok account. 

This is actually a centerpiece of American foreign policy. 

Because the war in Ukraine is not theater, and nobody doubts that America’s posture toward it is important. For Trump, it appears to be important because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and because he promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours upon taking office. It is important because he has, for nearly a decade now, assiduously fought off suggestions that he has some untoward relationship of influence with Putin by doubling down on his sympathy with the Russian dictator. It is important because he has been willing, eager even, to accommodate Putin by blowing up the American relationship with European and other allies who rely on American collective self-defense promises. When Trump, oh so long ago, promised that he would “get along” with Putin, this sort of thing—a Melian world in which “right . . . is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”—was precisely what he was talking about. This “deal” is central to Trump’s vision of the way the world should work. 

And what is the morally serious person to feel when his country, over a remarkably short space of time, reorients one of the most fundamental cornerstones of its foreign policy toward colluding with the strong in wiping out the weak? 

And what is the morally serious person to feel when his country lays on the table a “deal” that amounts to a capitulation to occupation and domination by an embattled democracy and demands assent within a week from a government wholly reliant on American support? 

And what is the morally serious person supposed to feel when that cornerstone of American policy has so evidently changed from supporting the freedom and independence of smaller countries and democracies to support for their conquest and domination by murderous gangsters? 

Well, there’s anger, yes. And there’s indignance. And there is that feeling of helplessness again. And there are a lot of other emotions too—worry about friends who don’t have electrical power or heat, for example, and a constant fixation on how one might mobilize limited resources to reduce harm. 

But there’s also this shame—this feeling to which I am unaccustomed in thinking about American policy. And this shame is different from the other shames. Because this policy is not a sideshow. And the harm is not a collateral consequence of anything. The harm is the point, the goal. And this shame is also different, because I have no answers to my text correspondents from yesterday, even though America promised answers. I cannot tell them that the asteroid impact isn’t coming or that they will see their families again or that their uncles didn’t die in vain. I cannot even tell them any more that America—however fecklessly, however arrogantly—is on their side. 

Because we’re not on their side. We are on the other side. 

A while back, I took New York Times reporter Michael Crowley on a tour of the perimeter of the Russian embassy compound for an article he was writing on just how isolated the embassy staff had become. Along the way, we ran into a man who was holding up pictures to the security cameras at the embassy for the guards to see. Here’s how Crowley described the interaction: “Bob Stowers, a local resident, said he stops at each of six security cameras on his daily walk past the embassy and holds up a news article about the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. ‘It makes me feel a little bit better,’ he said.” 

What Crowley left out was the question he had asked—leaning out of my car—that precipitated this remark. Crowley and I came upon Stowers, whom I do not know, holding up an article to one of the cameras and he asked me to pull over so he could talk to him—which I did. They had a brief exchange, in which Stowers explained what he was doing, and that he did it regularly. Whereupon Crowley asked him: Do you think it has any impact?

Stowers responded, very earnestly: “Oh no. But it makes me feel a little better.” 

That, my friends, is all of us now. With the full force and power of our government directed at supporting evil, we are left to do the small things that make us feel a little better. 

For me, and I just want to be candid about this, this shame is a central motivator. And it’s vain, I know, because I am fully aware that no part of this devastating betrayal of American power and promise is remotely about me or how I feel. And I am fully aware as well, painfully aware, that my words and actions have no more capacity for impact on events of this magnitude than does Stowers showing pictures of Navalny to security cameras. 

But this shame is changing my relationship with my country. My muscle memory of the essential goodness of American power has weakened. 

Last night, I projected the above image of Putin as a death head—by Latvian artist Krišs Salmanis—on the Russian embassy in Washington. The Russians responded by projecting their trademark “Z” and “V” spotlights on top of my projection—these symbols being emblems of Russian militarism. I noted that the United States government now stands behind the Putin death head. And it no longer opposes the “Z.”

The Situation continues tomorrow.