Thin blue-and-yellow line

The line between American chaos and American greatness runs through Ukraine

[Click here for an audio version of this long-read for Great Power supporters]

In the coming days, we’re going to hear a lot about lines between order and chaos. But a lot of these lines will not be between anything — they are just lines toward different types of accelerating chaos.

Chaos is disordered and in that sense it can be frightening — but it can also be an opportunity for redefining systems. This is why Russia stirs chaos everywhere and fosters a culture of risk-taking — because it is actually Russia that “doesn’t have the cards” and is left trying to conjure opportunities for itself from the ephemera. The team around the current American president understands chaos in much the same way — opportunity to advance what would otherwise be unachievable.

So I want us to step back for a second and think through some of the lines of conflict we are running up against, and some of the choices — opportunities — ahead of us. And ultimately, I want us remember how a particular phrase that haunts modern American security discourse, thin blue line, was originally written — what it meant about America, American values, and the absolutely vital role American power plays in holding back the darkness of a less free world that we cannot, for any price, allow ourselves to be subsumed by.

But to do that, we have to triangulate a bit in the swirling nexus of super-disruption. And in time and substance, a key node to examine is where Russian aggression, Donald Trump, and the system of technology-fueled false “realities” that so ably ensnare us collided.

* There’s only ever the same Kremlin, but we refuse to see it *

We have this joke, in my team, about how every new US administration comes into office, reads the binder on Russia, declares but hark! If only Russia realized that the benefit for them is to join the West, then all will be well!, and then wastes a lot of time trying to bait the Kremlin into being a better version of itself. There are sticks and carrots and outlandish gimmes. Eventually, everyone realizes that a better Kremlin was never a possibility — though Moscow has perfected the art of playing along. But the Russians are NPCs in the game, as the kids would say — non-player characters. There are only hard-coded behaviors and objectives to animate them.

Ultimately, it isn’t a very funny joke: the lack of escape velocity from this interminable cycle of lost time since Putin openly told us what was coming in 2007 has resulted in a lot of deaths that didn’t need to happen. The failure to confront, or even measurably slow, the Kremlin’s full-frontal autocratic insurgency against democratic nations — including invading neighbors, widening intelligence operations and assassinations abroad, designing 21st century state mercenaries, screwing around in elections, and deploying a range of sabotage and hybrid operations on land, at sea, in cyberspace, and in the air — has also contributed to the erosion of the democratic order.

For the Americans who really don’t love this “30,000 ft” democratic order phrase — Russia has contributed to the erosion of all the things that keep us relatively safe and prosperous, including the economic, alliance, and security systems that America built after WWII as giant feedback loops to give us disproportionate positive benefits from these systems for the inputs we provide. Said simply, by failing to defend the attacks on this bigger architecture that holds up the sky of the free world, we’re ceding advantage to our enemies, yes — but we’re also making it harder and harder for our democracy to deliver to Americans at home.

This erosion is sometimes hard to fully illustrate. But there are points in the recent American timeline worth revisiting so we might learn.

I think a lot of us spend *a lot* of time thinking about February 2022 and the lead up to Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine. The questions rattle around — why did we do so little if we “had all the intelligence,” why did we believe Moscow’s narrative so thoroughly, why do we still listen to the analysts and experts who got this so thoroughly wrong. Myself, I knew what the reported intel was saying; I knew how some of the allies I deeply respect were reading that intel; I knew how the Ukrainians were chewing on it.

And I wanted to laugh at how batsh*t it was.

Not because Moscow wouldn’t do it. Not because the Kremlin was “more logical” than to attempt such an invasion at all, let alone without sufficient troops. Certainly not because of the finger-wagging or threats of sanctions or whatever was echoed back from Washington. Not because any of these rational-ish things. But because if you had spent a single day in Kyiv after 2014 and talked to any random Ukrainian in a bar, you knew that (ok maybe not every, but certainly a f*ckload of) Ukrainians were going to channel their inner Riho Uhtegi and rain hell on any invader that tried to take to the capital. This should never, ever have been a question. Nonetheless, the US administration signaled to Ukraine that there were options for surrender in advance.

Now 30-odd years out from when the Soviet Union gasped its last, we’re still letting Moscow interpret history, people, and events for us like this is some great wisdom and not sheer, elegant, beautifully crafted deception designed to engage us and reel us in and preserve the primacy of the connection to Moscow over our own best interests and our connections with our now-allies from the better nations that escaped Moscow’s rule.

**Ignoring Russian bullsh*t has placed the American homeland at risk **

This haunts me more than I like to admit, having spent the last 17 years observing the casual way we endlessly make deals small and large with Moscow at the expense of others as if there is no cost to us. But developing those reflexes of not seeing the costs of enabling Russian bullsh*t also placed the American homeland at risk.

I want to be very clear that the current US administration shares more with past administrations’ views on Russia that the popular discourse is comfortable admitting. Obama’s reset policy was a catastrophe that his people have never had to account for because of the questions about Russian meddling to aid Trump’s election in 2016. This interference was a thing that absolutely did happen, and whether you believe it was decisive or not, that manipulation and complicity targeted both sides of the American spectrum highly effectively.

Stated more clearly: we all played the roles Moscow hoped we would play when they started pouring poison into our ears. We divided. We raged. We ran up against the line of conflict from both sides. We set it on fire again anew anytime President Trump handed classified info to the Russians in the Oval Office, or obsequiously denied Russia’s attack on America sitting next to Putin in Helsinki, or threatened Ukrainian survival for such a small and sad reason as wanting info on a rival’s son. There were other things happening in Europe at the time — the bolstering of US defensive posture, positive programs of support to Ukraine and other frontline nations — but this, by necessity, was under the radar, happening around the president rather than through him.

In the big narrative, there was only Trump’s complicity with the Kremlin, or the total non-existence of the “Russia hoax.” Running a circle around this useless conflict line was the truth: we are Russia’s stated enemy, they are at war with us, and ensuring that defending against Russian aggression was no longer a point of bipartisan national agreement in America but the thing that divides us most made every risk they took to attack us worth it — a thousand fold.

Russia knows we still don’t see the nature and importance of their war. And our American blindness is a key accelerant to all the other nasty sh*t that they are doing in the world. This includes their efforts to erase the Ukrainian nation from the face of the earth.

The Kremlin saw how easy it was to deepen the divisions among us. How easy it was to make us see, feel, believe each other as enemies. How easy it was to create that “permanently operating front” through American society, with both sides clawing up against the line of conflict to keep it raw and seeping.

The conspiracies about everything deepened, for everyone, and sometimes I really fear no Americans actually see reality anymore, or understand that the future of our nation is still that all of us have to be in here together, as we have always been — hopefully with a full panoply of qualified public servants in their jobs, and maybe even elected officials we chose for their abilities to govern fairly and with information, rather than their deftness with ragebaiting us into burning down the republic.

*** Democracy requires some shared reality ***

Part of the outcome of 2016 meant the integrity of our information environment was just absolutely shredded. Shared reality was receding in the distance. “Truth” became non-intersecting narratives. Any threads connecting them were being actively cut by the intersecting interests of foreign adversaries and domestic extremists.

This warping of reality is the death of democracy.

Institutions can function, elections can be held, the garbage can be picked up, the motions of functional society can all be observed — but sane and ordinary people can fall down a narrative rabbit hole and spin further and further from making decisions that improve their lives or protect their own interests when the information that informs all the actions they take and how they judge the actions of others is now just a bucket of slop that too much “real” media wastes time slopping around even more for the rage clicks.

With our lack of defenses, our enemies would frankly be remiss in failing to exploit this tool against us.

And we — ourselves, our leaders, our defenders — would be remiss for not doing everything we can as individuals, institutions, and society to reestablish unwarped reality.

We’ve passed a dozen crisis points where we Americans had possibilities to reforge a common hold on something real. On January 6th, we almost made it. The abject horror of the looting of our Capitol by Americans stirred to bloodlust over whatever imagined phantasms veered our divergent realities back toward each other, so close, a crash, a rebound, then a fingertip away. But the deceptive gossamer across which we glanced each other was hardy stuff; before we could break through, the erasure of the insurrection was fast underway.

And that leaves me to imagine — to hope — that maybe the only real way back cannot be found in these domestics confrontations, but in correcting the origin point from which this newfound violent amplitude leapt.

And that is the moment we were attacked by an adversary — and failed to meet the challenge. Acknowledging Russia is our enemy in this spectral war, and defeating them first, may be the clearest way to defeat all the axis powers of this existential conflict.

**** Is it a thin blue line between order and chaos — or a blue and yellow one? ****

That leaves the battlefield between American reality and disreality not only on American streets — but in Ukraine. In defeating Russia — Russian lies, Russian ambitions, Russian tactics — in Ukraine. Not because defeating Russia will defeat every American bogeyman or conspiracy — but because saving Ukraine holds up the sky a little longer, inspiring more of our better angels to return to the scene. Having to commit the resources to save a brave, inspiring, good-natured, innovative nation — with the population, army, industry, and mindset to rebalance the scales of the collective west against the rising autocrats — could help us rebalance at home. They are the leading defenders of the values we claim as our historical legacy.

The domains that matter most for the future of the free world as we understand it must be won in Ukraine. Reinforced international humanitarian law and a centennial refresher that might does not make right; renewed commitment to the idea that every individual matters, has potential, has value, deserves opportunity; reborn commitment to representative government, and ensuring democracies can adapt to meet the challenges of the modern day — all of this can be delivered by defeating Russia in Ukraine, putting the Kremlin on trial for its crimes, and rebuilding a strong Ukraine integrated into our feedback loop architecture. It elevates the problems facing Americans to the challenges facing all of the free world, and gives us greater space and resources to find ways to deliver solutions with a commonality of purpose instead of homestead pitchforks and torches.

I always believe America is best at finding itself when it has to step outside its door. That who we are in the world and who we are at home are inextricably linked. It’s hard to see from the confines of our American island — like the Earth itself, maybe you have to travel all the way to the moon to appreciate its beauty and fragility and uniqueness.

***

At this point, some of you will definitely call bullsh*t and run off to tilt some other windmill. If that’s you, I wish you luck. But for the rest of you — I think maybe you understand the merit of trying to win the big fight instead of 20,000 small ones. The small ones remain important and they won’t all go away — but some of them at least will be overtaken by events, dimmed, burn less brightly long enough for us to regain sight of the North Star. This is time we need, breath we need. To remember that more perfect union we used to aspire toward instead of condemn.

Now, for those willing to give the Hail Mary a go, there’s one main roadblock: Donald Trump’s preoccupation with Moscow, and his seeming inability to accept that they hate him just as much as they disdain every other American.

***** Trump put the Trump in Trump-Russia all by himself *****

For forty years, President Trump has been fixated on Russia. Making a deal with Russia, reaping the riches of Russia, knowing the power of the most powerful in truly closed systems like Russia. He has pursued this across space and time. There could be a lot of reasons for this — maybe because of his Slavic wives, maybe because it used to be the forbidden kingdom, maybe he just got the idea in his head one day — who knows. But starting in the ‘80s, he pursued Russia. He visited the Soviet Union. He sent his kids to Moscow to try to find business partners. He did his stupid beauty pageant in Russia. There’s a trail of outreach to Russia and from Russia. But absolutely nothing to show for it in Russia.

But for all these decades, Trump kept pushing, and Russia kept pulling those strings. Because this is how it works with Moscow — once they know you’ll do things for them — want something from them — they never have to give you anything, they just keep you on the hook. And then, while they are jerking you around on the big peace deal you want, they call each other and laugh about it on the phone until they cry, and this is intercepted by allied signals intelligence because they absolutely want you to hear it.

A poignant big-stakes example of this can seen unfolding across the Black Sea from Ukraine in Georgia, where Russian assets and agents helped a Russian-made oligarch win the election in 2012 — and they’ve never given him a day off since. Sure, the guy got to move a bunch of his money out of Russia, and has significantly expanded that wealth with all his preferential “co-investments” in Georgia while he’s kept control of the country from the shadows. But he’s had a constant task list — to sabotage Georgian democracy, to allay any possibility of progress toward Europe and NATO, to ignore the war in Ukraine despite Russia’s continuing occupation of 20 percent of Georgian territory, to keep the doors open for “troublesome” Russians fleeing Russia, and to help Moscow evade sanctions and keep its relations with Iran wide open. These days he’s managing widespread popular protests against allegedly fraudulent elections, arresting political opposition and dialing the violence up and down to manage escalation without outside attention. There’s no rest for those who did Moscow a solid, even those who just want to retreat to their hilltop fortress and watch their sharks swim around. That isn’t ever how it works. The second you stop, there’ll just be someone new — like those captive sharks that keep dying in the tank when they forget to keep swimming.

That Russia is never going to give him what he wants is a lesson Trump has never learned, or does not care to. Returning to the presidency, what he wanted was an easy peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, which he thought he could get because he was a nice guy to one side and willing to strong-arm the other. Since the election, Moscow has done everything possible to signal they have no interest in stopping killing Ukrainians — including just saying it out loud repeatedly. Nonetheless the rollercoaster of goodies and outreach the White House has dangled for Russia in past months is hard to keep track of. Maybe Russia should be invited to the NATO Summit. Maybe Russia should be welcomed back to G8. It seems at least possible that Trump’s Middle East tour was meant to culminate in Istanbul to meet Putin — if the Russian president had bothered to show up for the peace talks Trump pushed for.

While other world leaders remain reluctant to even call Putin, Trump has an open line for him — as did Elon Musk, whose father is currently in Moscow to speak at a conference with the Kremlin’s favorite anti-western ideologues who have defined the whole “America is the enemy of Russia” thing for a new generation. Trump’s social media account did finally post a warning about Russia’s accelerated attacks on Ukrainian civilians since the supposed peace process started, but the blurted — “Vladimir, STOP!” — fell on deaf ears, especially when no actions from the White House followed. Trump’s allies in the Senate tried to give him an out by putting together an airtight package of stronger sanctions against Moscow — and Trump asked them to water it down. After telling Ukraine repeatedly they had no choice but to do it on their own — including diverting promised military aid for Ukrainian air defense to (supposedly) the Middle East — Trump said Ukrainians deserved whatever pain Russia would bring to them after their brilliant drone attack on Russian strategic bombers.

This list of Trump’s preferential bias toward Moscow in the last months is nowhere near complete — and nonetheless the picture is clear. As in 2016, rather that being angry that Russia tried to weaken his position and respond with strength against Moscow on behalf of his nation, Trump chose to wave his little hat and deliver a sheepish smile. Vladimir, here awaiting your call. <<insert call-me ring-a-ding hand gesture>>

It doesn’t make any sense — especially not for the current president. Except — except — this is just the thing he has worked toward for so bloody long.

****** All the men around the stupidly big tables ******

Sometimes people have a hard time understanding Trump’s odd obsequiousness in person with Putin — the same way it was very strange to watch him meekly do TV interviews as the junior partner to Elon Musk. But this dynamic is no surprise if you’ve ever seen the interactions between real oligarchs, which is a hierarchy dictated entirely by who has the most money, because you got that money in absolutely brutal ways — and every oligarch in the room knows exactly where they fit in that ranking. It’s why Putin famously made the show of strength, when he called the oligarchs in to heel, of making Oleg Deripaska — then rumored to be the richest man in Russia — get up and walk the length of the table in front of all the other oligarchs to sign the agreement he had not yet signed, and then do it again to return Putin’s pen. It was signaling about who the richest man in the room was, and who would be controlling the hierarchy of how wealth flowed from now on. And the hierarchy has remained the same ever since.

The American rich guy hierarchy is maybe less lethal, but the same reflexes of known rank exist. There’s an aspect of this in how Trump acts with Putin, an artifact from those decades working toward Russia.

The long table Trump now lords over, if the rift with Musk is real and continues, is at least one where he acknowledges he holds the most powerful office in the world. And if he can put one upstart gazillionaire in his place, why not another one? Maybe he will learn to appreciate the joy of upsetting the oligarch pecking order as much as he sparks joy from disrupting everything else.

But now we’ve arrived at present day — as the White House endeavors to create the conditions to deploy American soldiers into American streets, as the sense that violence has become inevitable is fanned, as the operations must be conducted to populate the narrative — an art form in which the Kremlin holds most of the awards. But after 2017, the American conspiracies became the justification for the hearings and investigations, and then the justification for new laws and executive orders, and now we’re diverting billions from the defense budget to fight an alleged invasion that isn’t.

The hyper-masculinity vibe of this administration is so jarring if you don’t inhabit that narrative dimension — but it makes perfect sense to those immersed in the brocaster jingoism of toughness and misogyny and supplement powders and “enhancements.” It also makes sense that this try-hard masculinity thus seeks to test itself against phantoms conjured by the bullsh*t narrative they have hawked.

There was never an invasion, and there was never an army of enemies in America. There is a problem with our immigration system that Americans want solved. But INVADERS was the word used quite deliberately to lay the groundwork for the test of constitutional powers that is underway. Only for those who require this narrative to be real is any of this tough or great and not merely the display of a bunch of men who either didn’t ever serve or take glee in pardoning war criminals wanting to feel whats it like to hold the lives of others in their hands.

It starts to feel like a strange dystopian set piece, split screens of the president getting air kisses from UFC fighters while his clash of narratives sets fires in LA — reminiscent somehow of Chechen warlord (and child cage fight enthusiast) Ramzan Kadyrov sending his fighters to do carnage in the early days of 2022.

Laughing it up with whichever cabinet members the sun shines on that day while your edicts to unleash the US military into American cities are published is such a jarring misalignment of how most Americans and the military both feel about this situation. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one to recall the famous line from Commander Adama in Battlestar Galactica (which remains a brilliant commentary on civil-military affairs in times of crisis):

“There's a reason that you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

******* the thin blue line isn’t what you think *******

A more rational administration that didn’t live in its own psyop box — amped up on adrenaline and in the midst of some dumb deathmatch with the factionalizing broligarchy — would simply look around, realize the ability of these methods to deliver real criminal migrants into custody was minimal, and weigh that the reaction from the public meant they had to adapt their means. If you’re simply arresting migrants who are reporting in for appointments and court dates, do it with uniformed officers who can show their faces and calmly explain procedures. There’s no need to raid an elementary school graduation in full tactical kit. Anyone who will argue this mismatch of means and ends is warranted is only in it for the narrative, and not at all for the preservation of the constitution, the rule of law, or the fine line of trust between law enforcement and the people that allows free society to function.

That fine line of trust is precisely the opposite of what the thin blue line ideology has come to represent. Its historical usage in the context of police has been widely documented. Sometimes it has been used in a more positive connotation, as a phrase of support for the enormously difficult work that many community police officers face, especially as they become the Swiss Army knife for a wide range of community problems that an abhorrence for social support spending has left them to handle. With permissive American gun laws, our police face serious risks in unpredictable situations. We all know that is undeniable.

But the other application of thin blue line has always been a more militant definition. At its core is the premise that it is only a small group of law enforcement officers that keeps chaos from overwhelming society. And while our police have every right to feel that way sometimes, this idea is, in a functioning democratic society, a lie. It’s society itself that preserves order in most instances, because the deal we make to live in societies is that we give up certain absolute freedoms in exchange for not having to do everything ourselves to survive.

This is the rule of law — ordinary folk upholding the rules of society because they know it is a better and safer way to live in exchange for the benefits of the system. The police are just there for the anomalous events. When the mindset of policing is us-or-them, force-or-darkness — it’s a false choice that can and has eroded trust with society. Combine that with the post-9/11 up-armorment of police forces and the heyday of defense industries selling machines and weapons of war and enemy surveillance to police the domestic population — and, well, that Adama line is getting blurred in purpose and mindset. Are the people who you serve, or are they the enemy.

Putin makes a similar argument about how the Russian security state “preserves order” for the population — only I doubt blue would be the color he would pick for the line, and the sacrificed freedoms are deep and vast. “Order” was how he erased even the seeds of a representative Russia, elevating the footmen of his thin KGB line to a stranglehold of the economy, speech, media, power, and the ability to wield state violence for control of absolutely everything. I don’t think that is the vision most Americans have for their nation — or at least, I really hope not.

The clarity to find just order at home, the clarity to build just order abroad — and here we are again, back to the idea that the two are linked for America.

And for this, I will just give you the original usage of thin blue line — which was in a poem by N.D. Anderson written more than a century ago, about the blue uniforms and unique purpose of the American army. It’s better if you just read it for yourself:

The thin blue line was about war, just war in the name of what is right. American soldiers — then in blue — fought for right not might and prevailed against oppression, and the poem is a warning that they must do everything in their power to preserve this tradition and not be corrupted by those who would use them for ill purpose.

Maybe America always feels it walks a thin line between order and chaos, between freedom and oppression, between those who would preserve the rights of others and those who would take them away. Our history on these lines has been messy, and often not at all glorious — but it has maintained directionality toward the more perfect union of imperfect parts. And that’s the idea of democracy — that the whole is strong and resilient even when everything underneath is always churn.

We Americans have at times found reflection and inspiration for that struggle at home in the more black-and-white battles of defending these ideas in the world. Likewise, when we have gotten them really wrong in the world, it feeds back into how we are getting them wrong at home. This spiritual linkage of the America apart and the America destined to lead is what makes us unique in our own core mythology. It’s what helps to give us purpose and knits our narratives together enough that they run parallel if never conjoin.

We’ve lost sight of even our most basic common purpose and common narrative at a time when the blue American line is so needed out there in the world — and possibly even more so, the blue-and-yellow line. Russia is the NPC, technology-fueled disreality the accelerant — and Donald Trump could just be the chaos or he could embrace the opportunity. But that means confronting Russia, and picking the right side of the right line. The lines his administration keeps drawing through America, he can only ever be on the wrong side of — an American Putin of a similarly decaying empire rotted by false narratives from which there are no escape.

In the lie of Putin and Russia, that he is great and Russia untouchable, maybe you can tell yourself this is something to work toward. But in the reality, there’s just a rich autocrat who drives 100 mph from his bunker to the Kremlin because he is afraid of his own people as much as Ukrainian drones. Any American president should want more than this smallness.

Quite simply, the generational line between order and chaos, freedom and oppression, is in Ukraine if Donald Trump wants to find it. And as an agent of chaos, he would likely find deep joy in how absolutely pissed off everyone would be if he ends up being the savior of the free world instead of its Stay Puft marshmallow man.

There, on the blue and yellow line, is a chance for real greatness, and a chance — just a chance — to win the chaos, and for the blue American line to stand for what it once did again.

— MM

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