John Judis Is Perpetually Wrong

 John Judis is an aging left of center pundit-type who finds a way to be wrong about just about everything. His latest is calling for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, that will be a product of US policy. His jumping off point is that US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin has called for a war to weaken Russia. Austin's point, no doubt, was that Russia cannot simply call an armistice, regroup and attack again in 5-10 years. Russia must be weakened to the point where it can no longer threaten the peace of Eurasia.

Judis tends to come at things from a '60s leftist point of view, where America is usually the bad actor.  So we have statements like this:

Such a statement portrays the war as being between the United States and Russia, it will make Russian President Vladimir Putin even more intransigent and even more willing to escalate, and it will make it impossible for the United States to play a constructive role in promoting negotiations to end the war.

The catch here is that the US is largely peripheral to any negotiated settlement. We are clearly not a neutral party here. And we shouldn't be. Peace in Ukraine is largely a product of Russia's designs. Ukraine's goals are pretty clear: preserve Ukrainian sovereignty and hopefully force Russia out of as many territories that they occupied in 2014. 

Judis continues:

There are Washington foreign policy experts who believe that Ukraine can win this war with Russia. Anders Aslund from the Atlantic Council, who was once a senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin, wrote on twitter, “My guess is that Russia will have to give up all its territories in Ukraine and face total defeat.” I have no inside information on the war’s progress, but I doubt Ukraine can win outright

Translation: I do not know anything about the actual conduct of the war, but I disagree with those who do. His later point is that the war will grind on and kill "several million" which seems unlikely. Hundreds of thousands, yes, but that is why war is awful and Russia must be chastised enough to not pull this shit again. No more Georgias or Chechnyas or Syrias. 

But wait, it goes on:

It may be that Putin will prove unwilling to negotiate. There have been reports that he has ruled out negotiations. But what seems unlikely today can become possible tomorrow, and the United States should do whatever it can to encourage, rather than discourage, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

So, Putin is 100% responsible for this awful war. He shows no signs of negotiating. But on the very slim chance that he might want to negotiate, America should, what, downplay our assistance to Ukraine? We cannot simultaneously stand up for the freedom of Ukraine and be a neutral umpire in peace talks. Let India take the lead there. Maybe China.

He concludes with this:

One final point: I think there is also a problem with the administration portraying the war in Ukraine as part of a global conflict between democracies and autocracies....There would have been good reason to defend Ukraine against Russia even if Zelensky were a monarch rather than Ukraine’s elected president.

I'm sorry, what? In many ways it is precisely because Zelenskyy is the elected president that Putin invaded in the first place. When Viktor Yanukovych ran Ukraine as a vassal state of Russia, Putin was fine. Euromaidan forced him from power and Putin immediately invaded Crimea and the Donbass. That's not complicated causation. Putin is invading precisely because Ukraine is consolidating its democracy and moving away from Moscow and towards Brussels. 

Judis seems to fall for a frame in which everything is  America's responsibility - a kind of international Murc's Law. Putin initiated this war, because he wants to crush democracy in Ukraine; he has threatened democracies in the Baltics and Poland; he has interfered in Brexit and US presidential elections. Putin is an active menace to the idea of liberal democracy in ways that Xi Xinping, for instance, is not.

Judis erases Putin's singular agency in this entire matter and chastises American rhetoric instead. 

UPDATE: Chait takes on some more egregious examples of this nonsense.