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Notes -
A defense of... what, exactly? Haiti, Ukraine, and the Calculus of Sovereignty
Imagine that tomorrow, by some insane folly, Brazil decides to invade and annex Haiti. Brazil in general is... not great. Lots of poverty, questionable rule of law, wild swings in politics in recent years. But compared to Haiti, whose government is a strong contender for worst in the world? Living in a society merely as flawed as Brazil would be an incredible improvement. So okay, in our imagination, Brazil definitely annexed Haitian territory through unprovoked aggression. But would we encourage Haitians to resist? Put Haitian flags in our Twitter bios? Would we support a government that is failing its people? Or would we ask whether Brazilian rule, however illegitimate, might offer Haitians marginally better prospects? So there's the question: Under what conditions does a state's right to sovereignty outweigh its failure to secure the welfare of its people?
This is the question I keep trying to answer for myself on Ukraine. In 2022, I didn't know much about Ukraine but my stance aligned with the general consensus: Russia's invasion was a brazen violation of international law, and Ukraine's territorial integrity demanded defense. But after three years of stalemate, over 500,000 casualties reported, a failed counteroffensive, and no plausible path to Ukrainian victory, I'm asking "What's it all for?" The conflict will ultimately end in negotiated concessions. Crimea retained by Russia, Donbas partitioned, security guarantees exchanged. Why prolong a war of attrition that sacrifices a generation to marginally adjust the terms? Why fight for Ukraine at all?
Poland vs. Ukraine: Reform and Stagnation
For contrast, consider Poland, a nation that, like Ukraine, emerged from Soviet domination in 1991. Both inherited corrupt, centrally planned economies and oligarchic rot. Yet Poland since then has been growing like crazy and today boasts a GDP per capita around $21,000. Ukraine, by contrast, basically didn't advance at all, and was at $4,500 per capita pre-war. As I said, I was ignorant about the details before, and I am only slightly less ignorant now of the specifics of these two countries' trajectories, but as a big believer in Adam Smith's economics, I am convinced that a GDP of $4,500 indicates something really, really wrong with Ukrainian governance.
So if Poland were being invaded by Russia, I would see their post-Soviet trajectory as something worth dying for. I would feel like they were fighting to stay on the one true path, all that is good and right about liberal democracy. But Ukraine? "Fighting for all that's good and right" is definitely the vibe on Twitter, but where is the evidence that Ukraine is on the path to becoming Poland? Okay, they elected Zelenskyy in 2019, but what has he done? What have been the fruits of Ukrainian reforms?
Conclusion
Shouldn't the hypothetical Brazilians invading Haiti be greeted as liberators? It truly would be hard for Brazilian colonial rule to be any worse than the current government of Haiti. Ukraine isn't the basket case that Haiti is, but its pre-war stagnation, evidenced by a $4,500 GDP per capita, casts doubt on its claim to be a bastion of liberal democracy, an ideal actually worth dying for. I see no virtue in increasing this war's death toll merely to tweak an inevitable settlement's borders. Russia's aggression is unjust, but if Ukraine's fight preserves only a corrupt stasis rather than a transformative future, why are we supporting it? It used to be that more cynical people said the US supported Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, and it's good for us that their soldiers die. But now we just hear the idealistic case. Is the idealistic case strong?
As you've pointed out, there are clear cases where more or less everyone either agrees that an invasion was justified e.g. the Vietnamese invading Cambodia to end Pol Pot's reign of terror or clearly unjust e.g. Iraq invading Kuwait, with a large grey area in the middle. Personally, I would say that for a place like Haiti anything would be an improvement over the current situation (if Haitians weren't black someone would have probably done something by now, but they hold back out of fear of being seen as racist/colonialist, and so I think progressive ideology deserves some amount of blame for the continued dysfunction there, but I digress), but that past a certain level of basic economic development where people aren't starving or completely lacking in basic healthcare or infrastructure that being merely poor (by first world standards) is not sufficient grounds for someone to overthrow your government, whatever their economic policies may be. That is, the US has no right to take over Cuba by force even if by doing so we could raise their GDP per capita to the level of Florida's. This isn't because I wish to consign the people of Cuba to poverty or believe in some absolute form of ethnic self-determination, but because I don't trust governments to make judgements about whether the citizens of neighboring countries would be better off under their own stewardship in good faith, and would rather they avoid doing this outside of edge cases like people being herded into death camps or cannibal gangs overrunning the capital, where either the government in question will ask for help directly or some multinational deliberative body can agree on an intervention.
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