Lessons from the Alaska Purchase
When Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage at 3 p.m. today, hopefully we will finally acknowledge the inevitable realities of the Ukraine war.
Why did Russia sell us Alaska?
Below is the check the White House wrote to the Kremlin, some 157 years ago.
We bought Alaska for 2 cents per acre. Adjusted for inflation, today that’d be about 46 cents per acre. This rankles many Russians, if they bother to think of it, and over the years when I have visited or lived there, I’ve often been told America only bought a lease — that we’d someday have to return Alaska, or renegotiate. That’s flat-out nonsense. The Treaty concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America was a full sale, as is, no returns. All of Russian officialdom recognizes this.
Yet the fringe “Alaska lease theory” is still popular in Russia. There are even maps out there fantasizing what Аляска would look like if Russia still owned it:
Which raises the question: Why did the Kremlin give away Alaska for so cheap?
Simple: They were realists.
Russia had just been through the grueling, hellacious Crimean War of the 1850s. This was a major, modern, international conflict, slotted in halfway between the Europe-devastating Napoleonic wars, which ended at Waterloo in 1815, and the coming conflagration of World War II in 1914. The English, French and Turks fought the Russians across some of the same sad patches of Ukraine and Crimea where we see war today:
In the 1850s, the Crimean War rapidly became a symbol of incompetent leadership everywhere. Conditions at the British military hospital in allied Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) were so horrific that cleaning it up brought fame to Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. Bungling British generalship sent 607 men on a suicidal frontal assault against heavily-fortified Russian Sevastopol, as immortalized in the Alfred Tennyson poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Forward, the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
That hopeless charge was part of the Battle of Balaklava, named for a village outside of Sevastopol. In winter, British troops in Balaklava were so poorly provided with warm clothing that it became another scandal, and civilians back home knitted warm face mask hats. Yes, even the balaclava was born out of official incompetence.
But as ineptly as the British, French and Turks may have conducted the war, Russia did worse. It was defeated, racked up huge debts, and felt itself over-extended.
A geopolitical reality came into view: Alaska was very far from Moscow. It was lightly populated by Russians, mostly trappers of sea otters. It would have taken an enormous commitment of national will and effort to ever defend it from invasion. And Russia’s hated enemy Great Britain was crouched right next door, in the form of its colony of Canada.
The tsar and his advisers realized this made Alaska a weakness and a liability.
But wait, some said. Wasn’t it possible Alaska might be home to a huge amount of gold, and other valuable natural resources?
Sure. But even that did not change the Kremlin’s cold, hard calculus. After all, the 1850s had seen not just the Crimean War, but also the California Gold Rush. Russia had once laid claim to California as well; there were Russian communities there, as well as Native Americans. But all would be overwhelmed, sometimes violently, by the influx of fortune-feverish Forty-Niners (named after the year 1849). If gold was found next in Alaska, the same thing would clearly just happen there, too.
So Russian leaders shrugged, accepted the on-the-ground facts, held their noses in distaste, and cashed a check for a measly $7.3 million. They at least had the comfort of giving Alaska to Americans, who they liked a lot better than Brits. In fact, we were given Alaska largely to keep the British out of it!
It’s ironic that President Donald Trump seemed on verge of forcing an end to the Ukraine war months ago, but then got distracted by talk of a coming Ukrainian gold rush in rare earth metals. Sadly, Trump’s advisers weren’t as good as the tsar’s.
Make Reality Great Again
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet this afternoon in Alaska to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine. They meet in territory that became American largely because the Russians, once upon a time not so long ago, recognized a hard reality: they did not have the strength or the stomach to fight for far-off Alaska.
We in America (and Europe) have also never had the strength or the stomach to truly fight for far-off Ukraine. That would have involved a crushingly oppressive national commitment, one that the sensible American people would never have accepted.
President Barack Obama warned us of this. He chose not to arm Kyiv’s forces when civil war broke out in Ukraine in 2014. And his reasoning was the exact same Tsar Alexander II offered five generations ago when he sold us Alaska: It’s too far away, and it would be hopeless and against our interests to try to defend it.
“[Ukraine] is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what” the United States does, Obama said in a frequently noted 2016 interview. He went on to urge everyone to “be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not … If there is somebody in [Washington] that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it.”
Nevertheless, Washington’s military-industrial-organized crime complex got what it wanted. It waited for Obama to leave, then convinced the first-term Trump Administration to arm Kyiv aggressively, then provoked the Russian invasion during the Joseph Biden Administration, and all along has cynically used every resulting tragedy for its own ends.
I’ve reviewed in past all the ways Washington intentionally kept this war going and in fact massively expanded it, even when Ukraine and Russia tried to end it repeatedly in the first few weeks.
For three and 1/2 years now, we’ve joined Russia in destroying Ukraine. We have also flirted with taking the entire world on a ride into the Valley of Nuclear Death — “ours not to make reply, ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die” — while gleefully testing all kinds of new weapons, and fleecing the nations of the world of billions of dollars “for Ukraine.”
The majority of Ukrainians have always wanted peace, and military neutrality. They wanted to live free of military blocs led by anyone — be it Washington, Brussels or Moscow. When Ukraine announced itself a free and independent state in 1990, it declared it would be “a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs.”
It’s amazing that we in the west could simply accept that concept — a permanent neutrality for Ukraine — and make everything better for Russians, Ukrainians and ourselves.
As usual your assessment is clear, and on point. But those who continue to profit from the Ukraine War are not yet feeling any pain. Wall St. continues to go up, there is no popular challenge to the deep state US government which lives in the fantasy of its own power. The Russian people who are dying directly on the battlefield, have less opportunity, even than Americans, to challenge their state power structure on the matter. Ukrainians, of course, have no voice, and matter to no one. Millions have fled.
Many of the key positions which won Trump voters have been repudiated overtly and in response to bribes and flattery, and the inertia in his base, trained in personal loyalty rather than principled governance, are very slow to realize the treason toward them that he is committing.
I don't think Trump, will seriously threaten nuclear war. But neither is he capable of making a courageous, intelligent decision against the interests of the military industrial deep state.
The incremental decay of US global power in inexorable. That will ultimately bring about facts on the ground that are capable of ending some of our deep states most heinous profiteering.
The Ukrainians should never have given up their nukes.