Ukraine, pro-Palestinian protests, and the implosion of the woke DEI bubble in higher education

Low expectations lead to low knowledge and low effort. Why is anyone surprised? History? Fuhgettaboutit! Daszak gets his due.

Photo by Margarita Marushevska on Unsplash

Earlier this week, I made the case for our obligation to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, Ukraine was left with the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal and a concomitantly huge inventory of ICBMs and strategic bombers. At that time, there was considerable sentiment around the world that the end of the five-decade-long Cold War should herald in a new era of nuclear disarmament. Getting Ukraine to participate was seen as essential to this effort.

To that end, Ukraine was encouraged to return it’s nuclear weapons to Russia, where they would be dismantled, and to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear state. Swords to plowshares. This was not an easy ask, as there was considerable sentiment in Ukraine that the weapons should remain under Ukrainian control.

The issue that Ukraine and other former Soviet states faced in keeping the weapons is that maintaining nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is very expensive. In the United States, a major function of both Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories is to maintain the readiness of our nuclear arsenal. Lacking these resources, offers to provide economic assistance to Ukraine to cover the value of the fissile material in warheads were a powerful incentive to get Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.

But it was a bumpy road. When talks between Ukraine and Russia on this issue broke down in 1993, the United States, acting as a broker, engaged Ukraine and Russia in a trilateral process. The result was a trilateral agreement signed in early 1994.

As a result of this agreement, Ukraine agreed to ratify the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) but would not agree to participate in the NPT without further security assurances. In December 1994, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which they agreed to defend Ukraine against aggression. This is what made Ukraine agree to give up its nuclear weapons.

This is all written down in black and white, and I have included the links above for your edification. The language is difficult to misinterpret. I maintain that our participation in the trilateral agreement and Budapest memorandum obligates us to defend Ukraine. This is as close to black-and-white as it gets in international affairs.

Let’s look at this another way. Let’s consider an alternate timeline where, after the 1993 Massandra summit, talks broke down between Russian President Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Kravchuk and there was no trilateral agreement or Budapest memorandum.

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, corrupt oligarchies almost immediately took control of the newly emerging free markets in the former communist states. Robust black markets emerged. To the average citizen of Russia or Ukraine, it probably looked a lot like “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Imagine, in the midst of this volatile mix of opportunity and widespread corruption, the lure of quick riches in the form of abundant nuclear materials available for potential sales on the black market. Had Ukraine not agreed to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state in exchange for written security assurances, I can imagine a world where fissile material from Ukraine’s arsenal ended up in the hands of North Korea, Iran, or some other bad actor. In that event, we might be looking at a world where a dirty bomb had irradiated a city somewhere, or, worse, a rogue nuke had been detonated in a shipping container in some port, killing millions, sometime in the past few decades.

So Ukraine did the world a favor. Make no mistake, they did themselves a favor too, but we made security commitments to them in exchange for their cooperation. That bill has now come due.

Yet, here we are, 30 years later, seemingly surprised that Ukrainians expect our help defending themselves. I think that there were two reasons that the United States never counted on being presented with an invoice by Ukraine. The first is that no one imagined Russia falling so quickly back into autocracy. The second is that we were counting on Ukraine being a member of NATO at some point.

Rank corruption in Ukraine is one of the things that scared NATO off for much of the past three decades. So Ukraine is not without some responsibility in the current mess. But you know who was more tired than anyone of the corruption? The Ukrainian people, who in 2019 elected a TV comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to be their president specifically because they were sick of business as usual.

It turns out that the U.S. isn’t the only country where people are willing to look beyond business as usual for unusual candidates who bring with them the promise of reform, though YMMV.

Am I surprised that we are where we are vis-à-vis Ukraine? No, I am not. Our president, Joe Biden, can’t remember what he had for dinner last night, much less the important details of a security agreement we reached with Ukraine three decades ago. Though, I must point out, Biden’s support for Ukraine, albeit milquetoast, has been one of the few highlights of his administration.

And Congress? Fuhgettaboutit. Most members of Congress have great difficulty finding their way from their heads to their fannies with their hands. Anyone looking for help from that bunch of dysfunctional nimrods had better not be holding their breath.

The thing about our tepid support of Ukraine in its war with Russia that baffles me is that even among people who don’t know a thing about the Budapest Memorandum, more than half of the country seems to want us to do more. It’s the far left and the far right that seem to be opposed to assisting Ukraine.

I understand some of the arguments on the right: that we need to look after our own security, it’s a lot of money for a country running a massive budget deficit, we are not the world police, etc., even if I disagree with them. I flat-out don’t understand the arguments from the left at all. Does the far left imagine that a president who thinks that there are very fine people on both sides in Gaza and wants to enable public schools to enable your kids to transition from a “birthing person” to a furry without your knowledge or approval lacks sufficient progressive bona fides to be trusted with treaties and whatnot?

Shifting gears, the pro-Palestinian protests that have swept colleges the past few weeks seem to be winding down, at least on college campuses, for a couple of reasons. The first, and most important, is that the spring semester is just about over. If a protest occurs on an empty campus, does it make a sound? The second is that college administrators are finally doing something about the protests—most of them—that have crossed the line between free speech (where applicable) and lawless activity.

As I decreed in my earlier fatwa on the protests, two things would be proven true in the fullness of time. The first was that these protests are not solely the work of enthusiastic but misinformed and gullible young Marxists majoring in liberal arts but of professional agitators. The second was that the tide of sentiment turned against the entitled whiners, whose other passion is demanding student loan forgiveness, who are the faces of these protests. This actually happened more quickly than I expected.

One would think that anyone with an Ivy League education looking for something worth occupying a building and being arrested for would have done some research on the cause du jour. Clearly, that is not the case with this particular cohort. Anyone who believes that Israel is the oppressor in this conflict and that Hamas is the victim hasn’t read the Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies, a.k.a., the Covenant of Hamas. Victims, my ass.

Why is there such a gap between perception and reality on this issue (and many others)? These young people are the products of a system of higher education that no longer values diversity of opinion but rather conformity to the woke principles of DEI, one of the most important of which is the oppressor/oppressed narrative. They’ve never heard any other side of any issue except woke. And since DEI promotes identity over merit, the educators who are supposed to be responsible for developing the minds of these young people generally don’t know much about how things actually work beyond their own woke bubbles anyway, which, as it happens, are slowly imploding.

Why should anyone be surprised at the implosion of education when things other than merit are tantamount to determining truth and promoting excellence? The actions of these young people are a feature of such a system, not a bug.

Two items from the world of science have caught my attention in the past few days. The first are allegations against Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Thomas C. Südhof over serious discrepancies in over 30 scientific papers. Whether you believe that this is malfeasance or, as Südhof insists, just sloppy work, it doesn’t speak well for peer review either way. Most of the discrepancies in question were fairly obvious. How these worked their way through peer review is an interesting question.

So much for trust the science.

The second item is the overdue questioning of infectious-disease specialist and Dr. Anthony Fauci COVID research associate, Peter Daszak, on Capitol Hill about whether or not the non-profit he heads, EcoHealth Alliance, conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in partnership with a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city in which COVID-19 originated. Daszak is an interesting figure who’s lately embarked on a crusade to refurbish his reputation as a scientist.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s Daszak’s reputation as a scientist that’s in question or at stake; I think that it’s his reputation as an honest and forthcoming human being and his ethics in shaping our response to the COVID pandemic that are in question. In the fullness of time, I think that may well prove much harder to repair.

So much for I am the science.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.