The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement opposing the US government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, saying the billions being funneled into the military-industrial complex “at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to pay for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in the face for working people.” The statement advocates a negotiated settlement for peace, saying continuing to pour weapons into the country will “needlessly prolong the war, resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it “risks escalating and widening the war – up to and including nuclear war.”
In response to this entirely reasonable and moderate position, the DSA is currently being raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed by blue-checkmarked narrative managers on Twitter. This is because the only acceptable positions for anyone of significant influence to have about this war range from supporting continuing current proxy warfare operations to initiating a direct hot war between NATO and Russia.
That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict: status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish. Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
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The DSA is once again getting viciously attacked for making the extremely controversial recommendation that the US pursue a diplomatic settlement instead of endless weapons shipments. Never ceases to be amazing that this is now considered a crazed, radical, radioactive position: https://t.co/d2YKS9C7Xx
This spectrum of debate has been shrunk on the one hand by imperial spinmeisters continually hammering home the message that any support for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions is “appeasement” and indicative of Russian sympathies, and on the other by hawkish pundits and politicians pushing for the most freakishly aggressive responses to this war possible. By forbidding the spectrum of acceptable debate to move toward peace while shoving it as hard as possible in the direction of warmongering extremism, imperial narrative managers have successfully created an Overton window wherein the only debate permitted is over how directly and forcefully Russia should be confronted, with calls for peace now falling far outside that window.
Which is a problem, because both direct NATO hot war with Russia and continuing along the empire’s current course of action in Ukraine are stupid. Direct conflict between nuclear powers likely means a very fast and very radioactive third world war, and the status quo proxy warfare approach isn’t stopping Russia as more and more territory is taken in the east in cool defiance of western claims that Ukraine is bravely vanquishing its evil invaders. Biden administration officials have told the press that they doubt Ukraine will even be able to reclaim the territory it has lost already. Unless and until something significant changes, Ukraine has no apparent path to victory in this war anytime soon.
In short, there is no exit strategy to this proxy war. There are no plans in place to deliver Putin a swift defeat, and the Biden administration remains steadfastly dismissive of even the slightest gestures toward diplomacy with Moscow. Boris Johnson has reportedly been buzzing around admonishing Ukraine’s President Zelensky, France’s President Macron and who knows who else not to work toward peace in Ukraine. The doors to ending this war quickly by either winning it or negotiating a peace settlement are both bolted shut, all but guaranteeing a long and bloody slog.
Which as it turns out suits Washington just fine. Biden administration officials have stated that the goal is to use the Ukraine war to “weaken” Russia, and the US already has an established pattern of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires as we saw in both Afghanistan and Syria. Continuing to pour weapons and military intelligence into Ukraine while working to cut Russia off from the world stands no chance of ending the war in a timely manner, but it does stand a pretty good chance of bleeding and weakening Moscow.
And since this is the course of action that has been taken by the empire, we can only assume that this is its desired outcome: not victory, not peace, but a long and gruelling war.
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Confirms that Ukrainian Pravda story from a couple of months ago. Angloid political elites don't want this war to end until they're satisfied enough Russians are killed to kneecap Russia as a rival—no matter how many dead Ukrainians it takes to do so.https://t.co/alKLzwy7DF
One of the major recurring criticisms of the Iraq invasion was that Bush rushed into it without an exit strategy, without a plan for ending the war once it had been started. This proxy war with Russia not only lacks a strategy for ending the war, it apparently only has strategies for not ending the war. No exit strategy is the strategy.
Whenever you point out the insanity of this approach you’ll get useful idiots of the empire objecting that by criticizing US proxy warfare and supporting a negotiated settlement you are guilty of “appeasement” and exactly the same as Neville Chamberlain, because the only argument empire apologists ever have is to compare every US-targeted government to Nazi Germany.
According to these propaganda-addled empire automatons, having the story of not compromising with Putin-Hitler and not committing the sin of “appeasement” is worth sacrificing everyone in the entire nation of Ukraine for. They will happily throw every Ukrainian life into the gears of this war while they sit safe at home eating Funyuns and tweeting, just so they can have that “we didn’t compromise with Putin” story hanging on their mental mantlepiece.
How many more lives are such people prepared to feed into an unwinnable war which the westknowinglyprovoked? How many more of other people’s children are they prepared to sacrifice? How long does the bloodshed need to drag on before their “no appeasement” story loses value to them? How long until people wake up from their propaganda-induced comas and realize we’ve been manipulated into supporting a proxy war which benefits ordinary people in no real way, and in fact impoverishes us and threatens our very lives?
There is no morally consistent argument for continuing this proxy war in the way it has been going. If you actually value life and peace, the only way out is through negotiation and compromise. I point this out not because I believe it will happen, but to hopefully help a few more people open their eyes to the fact that we are being deceived.
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There are grave fears for the safety of Ukrainian anti-fascist and human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, following his capture by Russians troops, reports Federico Fuentes.
As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat.
That is part of the reason why Nato issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia.
Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by Nato on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, Nato advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.
According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China.
In response, Beijing accused Nato of “maliciously attacking and smearing” it, and warned that the alliance was “provoking confrontation”. Not unreasonably, Beijing believes Nato has strayed well out of its sphere of supposed “defensive” interest: the North Atlantic.
Nato was founded in the wake of the Second World War expressly as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The ensuing Cold War was primarily a territorial and ideological battle for the future of Europe, with the ever-present mutual threat of nuclear annihilation.
So how, Beijing might justifiably wonder, does China – on the other side of the globe – fit into Nato’s historic “defensive” mission? How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways they weren’t before? How are Americans or Europeans suddenly under threat of military conquest from China?
Creating enemies
The current Nato logic reads something like this: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February is proof that the Kremlin has ambitions to recreate its former Soviet empire in Europe. China is growing its military power and has similar imperial designs towards the rival, breakaway state of Taiwan, as well as western Pacific islands. And because Beijing and Moscow are strengthening their strategic ties in the face of western opposition, Nato has to presume that their shared goal is to bring western civilisation crashing down.
Or as last week’s Nato mission statement proclaimed: “The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”
But if anyone is subverting the “rules-based international order”, a standard the West regularly invokes but never defines, it looks to be Nato itself – or the US, as the hand that wields the Nato hammer.
That is certainly the way it looks to Beijing. In its response, China argued: “Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [Nato] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is Nato that is creating problems around the world.”
China has a point. A problem with bureaucracies – and Nato is the world’s largest military bureaucracy – is that they quickly develop an overriding institutional commitment to ensuring their permanent existence, if not expansion. Bureaucracies naturally become powerful lobbies for their own self-preservation, even when they have outlived their usefulness.
If there is no threat to “defend” against, then a threat must be manufactured. That can mean one of two things: either inventing an imaginary threat, or provoking the very threat the bureaucracy was designed to avert or thwart. Signs are that Nato – now embracing 30 countries – is doing both.
Remember that Nato should have dissolved itself after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But three decades later, it is bigger and more resource-hungry than ever.
Against all advice, and in violation of its promises, Nato has refused to maintain a neutral “security buffer” between itself and Russia. Instead, it has been expanding right up to Russia’s borders, including creeping furtively into Ukraine, the gateway through which armies have historically invaded Russia.
Offensive alliance
Undoubtedly, Russia has proved itself a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of its neighbour Ukraine by conquering its eastern region – home to a large ethnic Russian community the Kremlin claims to be protecting. But even if we reject Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated assertion that Moscow has no larger ambitions, the Russian army’s substantial losses suggest it has scant hope of extending its military reach much further.
Even if Moscow were hoping to turn its attention next to Poland or the Baltic states, or Nato’s latest recruits of Sweden and Finland, such a move would clearly risk nuclear confrontation. This is perhaps why western audiences hear so much from their politicians and media about Putin being some kind of deranged megalomaniac.
The claim of a rampant, revived Russian imperialism appears not to be founded in any obvious reality. But it is a very effective way for Nato bureaucrats to justify enlarging their budgets and power, while the arms industries that feed off Nato and are embedded in western capitals substantially increase their profits.
The impression that this might have been Nato’s blueprint for handling Moscow is only underscored by the way it is now treating China, with even less justification. China has not recently invaded any sovereign territories, unlike the US and its allies, while the only territory it might threaten – Taiwan – is some 12,000 kilometres from the US mainland, and a similarly long distance from most of Europe.
The argument that the Russian army may defeat Ukraine and then turn its attention towards Poland and Finland at least accords with some kind of geographical possibility, however remote. But the idea that China may invade Taiwan and then direct its military might towards California and Italy is in the realms of preposterous delusion.
Nato’s new posture towards Beijing brings into question its whole characterisation as a “defensive” alliance. It looks very much to be on the offensive.
Russian red lines
Notably, Nato invited to the summit for the first time four states from the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.
The creation of a Nato-allied “Asia-Pacific Four” is doubtless intended to suggest to Beijing parallels with Nato’s gradual recruitment of eastern European states starting in the late 1990s, culminating in its more recent flirting with Ukraine and Georgia, longstanding red lines for Russia.
Ultimately, Nato’s courting of Russia’s neighbours led to attacks by Moscow first on Georgia and then on Ukraine, conveniently bolstering the “Russian threat” narrative. Might the intention behind similar advances to the “Asia-Pacific Four” be to provoke Beijing into a more aggressive military stance in its own region, in order to justify Nato expanding far beyond the North Atlantic, claiming the entire globe as its backyard?
There are already clear signs of that. In May, US President Joe Biden vowed that the US – and by implication Nato – would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily if it were attacked. Beijing regards Taiwan, some 200 kilometres off its coast, as Chinese territory.
Similarly, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called last week for Nato countries to ship advanced weapons to Taiwan, in the same way Nato has been arming Ukraine, to ensure the island has “the defence capability it needs”.
This echoes Nato’s narrative about its goals in Ukraine: that it is pumping weapons into Ukraine to “defend” the rest of Europe. Now, Nato is casting itself as the guardian of the Asia-Pacific region too.
‘Economic coercion’
But in truth, this is not just about competing military threats. There is an additional layer of western self-interest, concealed behind claims of a “defensive” alliance.
Days before the Nato summit, the G7, a group of the seven leading industrialised nations that form the core of Nato, announced their intention to raise $600bn to invest in developing countries.
This move wasn’t driven by altruism. The West has been deeply worried by Beijing’s growing influence on the world stage through its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, announced in 2013.
China is being aggressive, but so far only in exercising soft power. In the coming decades, it plans to invest in the infrastructure of dozens of developing states. More than 140 countries have so far signed up to the initiative.
China’s aim is to make itself the hub of a global network of new infrastructure projects – from highways and ports to advanced telecommunications – to strengthen its economic trade connections to Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Europe.
If it succeeds, China will stamp its economic dominance on the globe – and that is what really worries the West, particularly the US and its Nato military bureaucracy. They are labelling this “economic coercion”.
This week, the heads of the FBI and MI5 – the US and UK’s domestic intelligence services – held an unprecedented joint news conference in London to warn that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security”. Underscoring western priorities, they added that any attack on Taiwan would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen”.
Unilateral aggression
Back in the Cold War era, Washington was not just, or even primarily, worried about a Soviet military invasion. The nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction meant neither had an interest in direct confrontation.
Instead, each treated developing nations as pawns in an economic war over resources to be plundered and markets to be controlled. Each side tried to expand its so-called “sphere of influence” over other states and secure a larger slice of the planet’s wealth, in order to fuel its domestic economy and expand its military industries.
The West’s rhetoric about the Cold War emphasised an ideological battle between western freedoms and Soviet authoritarianism. But whatever significance one attributes to that rhetorical fight, the more important battle for each side was proving to other states the superiority of the economic model that grew out of its ideology.
In the early Cold War years, it should be recalled, communist parties were frontrunners to win elections in several European states – something that was starkly evident to the drafters of the Nato treaty.
The US invested so heavily in weapons – today, its military budget exceeds the combined spending of the next nine countries – precisely to strong-arm poorer nations into its camp, and punish those that refused. That task was made easier after the fall of the Soviet Union. In a unipolar world, Washington got to define who would be treated as a friend, and on what terms, and who a foe.
Nato chiefly served as an alibi for US aggression, adding a veneer of multilateral legitimacy to its largely unilateral militarism.
Debt slavery
In reality, the “rules-based international order” comprises a set of US-controlled economic institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that dictate oppressive terms to increasingly resentful poor countries – often the West’s former colonies – in desperate need of investment. Most have ended up in permanent debt slavery.
China is offering them an alternative, and in the process it threatens to gradually erode US economic dominance. Russia’s apparent ability to survive the West’s economic sanctions, while those sanctions rebound on western economies, underscores the tenuousness of Washington’s economic primacy.
More generally, Washington is losing its grip on the global order. The rival BRICS group – of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is preparing to expand by including Iran and Argentina in its power bloc. And both Russia and China, forced into deeper alliance by Nato hostility, have been seeking to overturn the international trading system by decoupling it from the US dollar, the central pillar of Washington’s hegemonic status.
The recently released “Nato 2030” document stresses the importance of Nato remaining “ready, strong and united for a new era of increased global competition”. Last week’s strategic vision listed China’s sins as seeking “to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains”. It added that China “uses its economic leverage to create strategic dependencies and enhance its influence”, as though this was not exactly what the US has been doing for decades.
Washington’s greatest fear is that, as its economic muscle atrophies, Europe’s vital trading links with China and Russia will see its economic interests – and eventually its ideological loyalties – shift eastwards, rather than stay firmly in the western camp.
The question is: how far is the US willing to go to stop that? So far, it looks only too ready to drag Nato into a military sequel to the Cold War – and risk pushing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
We live in dangerous and disconcerting times. Humanity is facing two existential threats that could end civilization as we know it — as well as other life on Earth. Yet, in the case of both global warming and nuclear weapons, international cooperation is sorely missing. What is even worse with regard to nuclear weapons is that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a growing trend toward normalizing the idea of nuclear war. In fact, as Noam Chomsky argues in this exclusive interview for Truthout, dismissals of the true threat of nuclear annihilation have grown to highly dangerous levels and “the means for reducing the threat of terminal war are being cast out the window.” But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Human agency has not ended,” Chomsky points out. “There are realistic ways to protect humanity from the existential threat that nuclear weapons pose.”
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered several unexpected and unintended consequences. One of them, which is not as widely discussed as it should be, is that the use of nuclear arsenals, perhaps with lower yields, has been almost normalized. Indeed, in the course of this war, we have heard of several scenarios for how Russia might use nuclear weapons, and, in the early days of the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin even ordered his country’s nuclear forces on a higher alert. And, just last month, he said that Russia will use nuclear weapons to defend its sovereignty and stressed that the “era of the unipolar world” has ended. On the other hand, we have people like Francis Fukuyama saying that the possibility of a nuclear war “is not something anyone should be worrying about” because there are many stopping points before we get to that point. How did we get to a stage where people are having such a nonchalant attitude about nuclear weapons?
Noam Chomsky: Before turning to the important issues raised, we should keep firmly in mind one overriding concern: The great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or the wreckage of human society will be so extreme that no one will care. All else fades alongside of recognition of that fundamental fact about the contemporary world, very possibly the last stage in human history. It cannot be reiterated too often or too strongly.
In the Toronto Star, the veteran journalist and political analyst Linda McQuaig wrote that she had just heard “what struck me as possibly the most foolish remark ever uttered on TV. And I know that’s a high bar.”
McQuaig was referring to “the celebrated U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama” and the comment of his that you just quoted. Put simply, “there’s no need to be concerned about nuclear war. Take my word for it.”
The long-term strategy, then, is to keep the war going in order to weaken Russia, and to a degree considerably harsher than the treatment of Germany at Versailles a century ago, which did not succeed in the proclaimed goal.
The long-term strategy was reaffirmed clearly enough in the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit, providing a new “Strategic Concept” based on a core principle: no diplomacy on Ukraine, only war to “weaken Russia.”
It takes no great insight to see that this approximates what may be the most foolish remark ever uttered. The tacit assumption is that while the U.S. and its allies are proceeding to weaken Russia sufficiently, Russian leaders will stand by quietly, refraining from resorting to the advanced weapons we all know Russia has.
Take our word for it.
Perhaps so, but quite a gamble, not only with the fate of Ukrainians but far beyond.
In further defense of this colossal foolishness, we might add that it is prevailing common sense. It is commonly just taken for granted that we can disregard the shocking record of the past 75 years, which demonstrates with brilliant clarity that it is a near miracle that we have escaped nuclear war — terminal war if major powers are involved.
Illustrations are everywhere. To take one, some of the most careful and sophisticated studies of public opinion on major issues are carried out by the Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication. Though climate is the main focus of their concerns, the studies range much more broadly.
The most recent study, just released, poses 29 major current issues and asks subjects to rank them in terms of significance for the upcoming November election. Nuclear war is not mentioned. The threat is severe and increasing, and it’s easy to construct all-too-plausible scenarios that would lead up the escalation ladder to terminal destruction. But our leaders and “celebrated political scientists” assure us, either directly or implicitly: “No need for concern, take our word for it.”
What is omitted from the study is terrifying enough. What is included is hardly less so. “Of 29 issues we asked about,” the directors of the poll report, “registered voters overall indicated that global warming is the 24th most highly ranked voting issue.”
It is only the most important issue that has ever arisen in human history, alongside of nuclear war.
It gets worse on a closer look. Republicans may well take Congress in a few months. Their leadership is not concealing their intent to find ways to hold on to virtually permanent political power, independent of the popular will, and might succeed with the help of the ultra-reactionary Supreme Court. The party — to dignify it with that word — has been 100 percent denialist on global warming since it succumbed to the Koch conglomerate onslaught in 2009, and the leadership has carried along the voting base. In the Yale study, moderate Republicans ranked global warming as 28th among the 29 options offered. The rest ranked it 29th.
The two most important issues in human history, issues of literal survival, may soon be off the agenda in the most powerful state in human history, carrying forward the grim experience of the four Trump years.
Not completely off the agenda, of course. There are voices of sanity, some with considerable prestige and experience. A decade ago, four of them — William Perry, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Sam Nunn — wrote an op-ed in TheWall Street Journalcalling for “reversing the world’s reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”
They are not alone. Last month (June 21-23), the first meeting was convened of states-parties to the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Citing “increasingly strident nuclear rhetoric,” the TPNW states-parties issued the Vienna Declaration, which condemns all threats to use nuclear weapons as violations of international law, including the UN Charter. The declaration demands “that all nuclear-armed states never use or threaten to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances.”
The nuclear states have refused to join the treaty, but that can change under popular pressure, as we have often seen before.
In August, the 10th review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) will convene. That could offer an opportunity for an organized public to demand adherence to its provisions, which call for “good faith” efforts to remove the scourge of nuclear weapons from the Earth, and while pursuing these efforts, to sharply reduce the enormous threats they pose.
That will not happen if the two most important issues in human history are removed from attention, one almost completely while the other barely reaches a fraction of the concern it requires if there is to be a livable world.
We need not be passive observers, content to be mere instruments in the hands of the powerful. That is a choice, not a necessity.
Recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned in an interview with CNN that the world should take seriously the possibility that Russia might use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. However, on various occasions, he himself has hinted at the idea of Ukraine developing nuclear weapons even though the country is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. I don’t know if Ukraine has the capabilities to proceed with the development of a nuclear weapons program, but wouldn’t it be absolutely suicidal to do so?
Completely suicidal. Even the first tentative efforts would lead to harsh retaliation, and then up the escalatory ladder. But in the light of the level of sanity exhibited by the leaders of the world, is it unthinkable?
Putin has openly stated that Russia is open to dialogue on nuclear non-proliferation, but the perspective on the part of the U.S. appears to be that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has subverted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. I’d like your comments on this issue.
Let’s recall the overriding concern: The great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or the wreckage of human society will be so extreme that no one will care.
It follows that every option for dialogue should be seriously considered, and where at all feasible, pursued. Dialogue can in fact be pursued in an international setting at the upcoming NPT review conference. Or the option can be simply dismissed as unthinkable, adopting the stance of the West at the G20 conference last week, where Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was treated “like a skunk at the tropical resort party, shunned by many, though by no means all.”
The final qualification is of no slight significance. Those who did not join the West in shunning the skunk included the Indonesian hosts, who welcomed him, and a number of others: China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina and others, along with Indonesia. That raises once again the question of just who is being isolated in the new world order that is taking shape.
That is no idle question, and it is not ignored. There are some serious reflections about it close to the centers of power. One case is an analysis of the evolving world order by Graham Fuller, former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA with responsibility for global intelligence estimates. His analysis raises issues that merit close attention.
Fuller has no illusions about the nature and roots of the war. Prime responsibility falls on the agents of the criminal aggression, Putin and his circle. That should be beyond controversy. But “secondary condemnation belongs to the U.S. (NATO) in deliberately provoking a war with Russia by implacably pushing its hostile military organization, despite Moscow’s repeated notifications about crossing red lines, right up to the gates of Russia. This war did not have to be if Ukrainian neutrality, á la Finland and Austria, had been accepted. Instead, Washington has called for clear Russian defeat.”
Fuller sees the conflict not as a “Ukrainian-Russian war but an American-Russian war fought by proxy to the last Ukrainian… And most of the rest of the world — Latin America, India, the Middle East and Africa — find few national interests in this fundamentally American war against Russia.”
Those who refused to shun Russia at the G20 conference strongly condemned the invasion but did not take too seriously the professed outrage of the U.S. and its allies. Very likely, they were asking whether the U.S. was shunned as a pariah after carrying out its many violent criminal exploits, which there is no need to review. For many, the memories are heightened by vivid and ugly direct experience. How can they be expected to pay attention to the protestations of high principles from the leading violators of these principles, always with immunity from anything more than occasional mild reprimands?
Europe is already suffering badly, Fuller continues, and will, sooner or later, have to “return to the purchase of inexpensive Russian energy.” It has little realistic choice. “Russia lies on the doorstep and a natural economic relationship with Russia will possess overwhelming logic in the end.” Beyond that, “Europe can even less afford to blunder into confrontation with China — a ‘threat’ perceived primarily by Washington yet unconvincing to many European states and much of the world.” It will cost Europe dearly to isolate itself from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “perhaps the most ambitious economic and geopolitical project in world history,” which runs right through Russia and “is already linking China with Europe by rail and sea… The end of the Ukraine war will bring serious reconsideration in Europe about the benefits of propping up Washington’s desperate bid to maintain its global hegemony.”
Another consequence of this desperate bid is that,
Russia’s geopolitical character has very likely now decisively tilted towards Eurasia… Russian elites now no longer possess an alternative to accepting that its economic future lies in the Pacific where Vladivostok lies only one or two hours away by air from the vast economies of Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. China and Russia have now been decisively pushed ever more closely together specifically out of common concern to block unfettered US freedom of unilateral military and economic intervention around the world. That the US can split US-induced Russian and Chinese cooperation is a fantasy. Russia has scientific brilliance, abundant energy, rich rare minerals and metals, while global warming will increase the agricultural potential of Siberia. China has the capital, the markets, and the manpower to contribute to what becomes a natural partnership across Eurasia.
Fuller is far from alone. “The idea of Eurasia is once again the subject of geopolitics,” reads a headline in the London Economist. The report reviews the renewed attention to the principle of the founder of modern geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, that control of the central Asian heartland is key to world control. These conceptions are taking new form as the Ukraine war reshapes the global strategic landscape in ways that may turn out to be profound.
The “utter corruption” of the media, Fuller writes, is one of the most disturbing features of the current crisis: “In the midst of a virulent anti-Russian propaganda barrage whose likes I have never seen during my Cold Warrior days, serious analysts must dig deep these days to gain some objective understanding of what is actually taking place in Ukraine.”
That is sensible advice. There is more. The tendencies that are shaping world order are not immutable. Human agency has not ended. That crucially encompasses the agency of an organized public that demands an end to cynical posturing and a serious commitment to grasp the opportunities that exist for dialogue and accommodation. The alternatives are too grim to contemplate.
The campaign for nuclear disarmament goes back to the late 1950s. Yet the prospects for nuclear disarmament are dim, if not nonexistent. Nuclear disarmament requires that nation-states trust each other, which is a zero-probability event in the real world, but it is also extremely doubtful that the nuclear knowledge genie can ever be put back in the bottle. So, what is to be done? What are the most realistic ways to avoid nuclear war?
There are realistic ways to reduce the likelihood of terminal war — once again, the appropriate term for nuclear war involving great powers. The most immediate is a serious arms control regime. Elements of such a regime had been laboriously constructed since Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposals in 1955 — dismantled by Trump in May 2020 when he was wielding his wrecking ball. There were other important steps forward, among them the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, which significantly reduced the threat of outbreak of terminal war in Europe — and, we should not forget, was impelled by enormous popular anti-nuclear protests in Europe and the U.S. Another step was the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which both sides recognized to be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”
The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dismantled by George W. Bush, the INF treaty by Trump.
At the end of the Trump years, very little was left beyond the New START treaty, which Biden was able to rescue from demolition literally by a few days. It was due to expire shortly after his inauguration.
There is more, such as Trump’s destruction of the joint agreement (JCPOA) on Iranian nuclear programs in violation of the UN Security Council, which had endorsed it, another contribution of the modern GOP to global destruction.
One of the great tragedies of the Ukraine war is that these means for reducing the threat of terminal war are being cast out the window. The U.S. cannot deign to descend to agreements with the skunk at the party. The tragedy is enhanced by the impending return to full power of the party of the wreckers.
Nonetheless, the same kinds of mass mobilization that helped bring about earlier steps toward sanity can be effective again. That means first resurrecting the tattered arms control regime, and then moving well beyond.
Other steps could be taken right now if sufficient popular pressures were mounted. In the coming weeks in fact, at the August NPT conference. Beyond moves to advance the TPNW and the professed goals of the NPT itself, there are further possibilities. One crucial issue that is likely to be raised again at the conference is a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East. That could be a significant step towards international security. Popular pressures could help bring it to realization.
Establishment of a Middle East NWFZ has come up regularly at NPT review sessions, primarily at the initiative of the Arab states, who have even threatened to withdraw from the NPT if moves are not taken to implement it. It has almost unanimous global support, but is always blocked by Washington, most recently by Obama at the 2015 conference.
To review the basic facts once again, the call for a Mideast NWFZ is backed by the Arab states, Iran, and the Global South, G-77, now expanded to 134 countries, the large majority of the world. Europe raises no objections. The unilateral U.S. veto is accompanied with various pieties, easily dismissed. The real reasons are well understood: the massive Israeli nuclear weapons system, the only one in the region, must not be subject to international regulation. That is off the table, as TheNew York Times editors made clear recently in calling for a “Nuclear-Weapons-Free Persian Gulf” — Persian Gulf, not Middle East. A Persian Gulf NWFZ, the editors say, would be “One Way Forward on Iran,” which is causing troubles once again by adhering to the unanimous consensus (minus the Master).
The U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons facilities, presumably because to do so would call into question the legality of all U.S. aid to Israel, under U.S. law. That’s a door that both political parties have insisted on keeping tightly shut, but as public opinion on the matter has been visibly shifting, there are some breaks in rigid discipline. Congressional Rep. Betty McCollum, for one, has aroused much ire for sponsoring legislation to bar Israel from using U.S. military aid to attack Palestinian children.
Establishment of NWFZs is an important step toward reducing the nuclear weapons threat, even apart from the symbolism of global rejection of these monstrous achievements of human ingenuity. More accurately, it would be an important step if these could be implemented. Unfortunately, they are blocked by U.S. insistence on maintaining nuclear weapons facilities within them, matters we have reviewed before.
All of this could be on the agenda, right now, as ways of addressing the terminal threat.
Beyond that, there is the overriding concern: To repeat again, the great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or nothing else will matter.
Ukrainian feminists released “‘The right to resist’: A feminist manifesto” on July 7 in response to a document entitled ‘Feminist Resistance Against War Manifesto’.
As the bloody conflict in Ukraine continues, the rhetoric from the imperial spear-holders in Washington and some allies is becoming increasingly fixated with one object: victory against Russia. Such words should be used sparingly, especially given their binding, and blinding tendencies. When the term “unconditional surrender” was first used by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the January 1943 Casablanca conference in the context of defeating Nazi Germany, not all cheered. It meant a fight to the finish, climbing the summit and dictating terms from a blood-soaked peak.
With such language crowning the efforts of the Allies, the Axis powers – certainly Germany and Japan – could continue fighting the war of extermination, aware that no terms they could submit would be taken seriously. There would be no compromise in this existential confrontation. It made the Allied advance in Western Europe slower and enabled the Soviet Union to expel German forces and duly occupy most of Eastern Europe. It made negotiations about whether Japan would retain its emperor on surrendering nigh impossible, leaving the route open for the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The supply of weapons to Ukraine in its efforts against Russia has become a zealous mission that will supposedly achieve victory. Messianic impulses tingle and move through the Washington and London establishment, with some echo in Warsaw and the capitals of the Baltic states. An air of unreality – be it in terms of negotiating the future of Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation – fills such corridors of power.
On May 1, after travelling to Kyiv, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised the colours. “America,” she declared with earnestness, “stands with Ukraine until victory is won.” She made little effort to expound on what this would entail, be it the expulsion of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, or the “meat grinder” solution, leaving Kyiv and Moscow to bleed, weakening the latter and strengthening NATO security over a dead generation.
Her remarks did enough to worry Michael T. Klare, defence correspondent for The Nation. “Nowhere, in her comments or those of other high-ranking officials, is there any talk of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, only of scenarios leading to Russia’s defeat, at whatever cost in human lives.”
The vagueness of the term has led to grand, sanguinary calls to battle unenlightened Russian barbarism, with the UK and US governments repeatedly calling this a conflict that involves the whole west, even the world. Peering more closely at the rhetoric, and another sentiment comes to the fore: the desire to bloody Russia vicariously while arms manufacturers take stock.
For over a decade, Ukraine has been something of a plaything in branches of the US State Department, and US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman can be found telling the BBC’s Newshour that Russia had to “suffer a strategic failure” in Ukraine.
The checklist for doing so, as outlined by US President Joe Biden, is lengthy. “We will continue providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, powerful artillery and precision rocket systems, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles, Mi-17 helicopters and ammunition.”
On this score, the hawks are in the ascendancy. Anyone uttering the view that a Ukrainian victory would hardly be total, let alone likely, have been reviled, as British military historian and journalist Max Hastings writes. They are tarred and feathered as either “ultra-realists” or appeasers.
Hard-headed peace talks, let alone anything approximating to negotiations have, as a result, also become taboo. The early June suggestion by French President Emmanuel Macron that, “We must not humiliate Russia, so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels” was met with disdain and fury in Kyiv.
The previous month, the world’s oldest Machiavellian devotee, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, dared mention the need for the warring parties to commence talks. Unconvicted war criminal he may be, his view that “negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome” was hardly controversial. But the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded by foraging in the dustbin of history. “It seems that Mr Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022, but 1938.”
In Kyiv, the very idea of making a deal with Moscow is being met with revulsion. “They have killed too many people,” opines Oleksii Movchan of the Ukrainian Parliament representing Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People Party. “They have destroyed too many cities. They have raped too many women. If the war stops now and the world tries to accommodate Putin, then international law will have no meaning.”
For the moment, support from the US is taking the form of logistical and material assistance in what has already been called by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a proxy war against Moscow. With each ghoulish weapons update, we can read about the types of murderous devices used, and how effective they were. The latest featured an attack on Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region by Ukrainian forces using US-supplied Himars missiles. Kyiv’s line: the attack was a success, destroying a Russian ammunition depot, killing dozens of Russian military personnel. The Russian angle: homes and warehouses storing fertiliser had been pulverised, killing five and wounding 80.
Ukrainians have become surrogate democrats and freedom fighters (these terms are not necessarily identical) and Washington is willing to ensure, at least for the moment, that they have the weapons. Other countries in Europe are willing to keep the borders open to Ukraine’s refugees. But how long will this last? Hearts can, in time, harden, leaving way for national self-interest to take hold. At some point, the weapons will have to be put down, the war making way for the jaw. Till then, the unofficial policy of fighting to the last Ukrainian will be in vogue.
Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:
“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”
~ John Pilger
This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.
From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations gave more coverage to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.
And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate. America’s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.
“It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
~ Noam Chomsky
This quote, from an interview last month with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.
People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.
The need of the political/media class to continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked invasion” over and over again is itself a confession that they know they’re not telling the whole truth. It’s the imperial propaganda version of this classic tweet:
My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
Chomsky outlines many of the provocations the US/NATO power structure engaged in prior to the conflict, which many western analysts spent years warning was coming as a result of the provocative actions that were already being taken by the empire. The invasion could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and some low-cost, high-reward concessions ike honoring the Minsk agreements and providing assurances of neutrality for Ukraine, but they chose provocation and escalation instead. Add to that the exponentially increased shelling of the Donbas by Kyiv immediately prior to the invasion and you can understand why empire spinmeisters are working so hard to push the “unprovoked” line.
None of this is to say that Russia is blameless in this war; if I provoke someone into punching somebody they are still morally responsible for having thrown the punch, but I am also responsible for having provoked it. Russia is responsible for its actions, and the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure is responsible for its actions. Putin is responsible for invading, the western empire is responsible for provoking that invasion. Not complicated.
In the same interview Chomsky also says that “censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime” regarding this war. That assessment plus Pilger’s testimony about war propaganda unlike anything he’s ever seen shows that imperial narrative management is at an all-time high, which wouldn’t be happening unless the empire had some major agendas it wanted to roll out in the coming years.
“At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.”
Echoing the urgent warnings that Stephen Cohen was making at the end of his life, a new article by Hedges outlines the profoundly dangerous games the empire is playing with a nuclear superpower in its continually escalating proxy war against Moscow.
The observations by Pilger and Chomsky about how much effort is going in to manipulating people’s understanding of this war make sense when you realize that the agendas the empire is trying to roll out against Russia now and then China later down the road stand not only to throw the world into poverty and starvation, but to wipe us off the face of this planet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good reason the world’s most powerful government needs to risk the life of everyone on earth in a bid to secure planetary domination. It is possible for all nations and peoples to simply get along and collaborate toward the common good together. All that would need to happen is for these agendas of total hegemony to be abandoned.
Unfortunately the managers of empire don’t seem to have any plans to abandon their goal of global conquest anytime soon, so we the ordinary people of this world may end up having to force the issue with them at some point in the interests of our very survival.
This is a hell of a time to be alive, but man they’ve been keeping it interesting.
__________________
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There are significant parallels between the international crises in Cuba in 1962 and Ukraine today. Both involved intense confrontations between the USA and the Soviet Union or Russia. Both involved third party countries on the doorstep of a major power. The Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to lead to WW3, just as the Ukraine crisis does today.
Cuban Missile crisis and the current crisis in Ukraine
In 1961, the US supported an invasion of Cuba at the “Bay of Pigs”. Although it failed, Washington’s hostile rhetoric and threats against Cuba continued, the CIA conducted many assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Cuba, seeking to defend itself, or at least have a means of retaliating in case of another attack, sought missiles from the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed and began secretly installing the missiles. As a sovereign nation having been attacked and under continuing threat, Cuba had the right to obtain these missiles.
US President JF Kennedy thought otherwise. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, he said the missiles endangered the US and must be removed. He imposed an air and sea quarantine on Cuba and threatened to destroy a Soviet ship traveling in the high seas to Cuba. The world was on edge and there was global fear that World War 3 was about to erupt. In my homeland Canada, we went to bed seriously worried that nuclear war would break out overnight.
Fortunately for humanity, cooler heads prevailed, and there were negotiations. The Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles in Cuba. In return, JFK agreed to withdraw US missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The Cubans were furious, thinking they had been betrayed and lost their means of defense. But the Soviets had the bigger picture in mind, along with a US commitment to not invade Cuba.
The situation now in Ukraine has similarities. Instead of missiles in Cuba being a threat to the US, NATO in Ukraine is seen as a threat to Russia. NATO has steadily expanded east and installed missiles in Poland and Romania. Since 2008, Russia has explicitly said that Ukrainian militarization by NATO was a red line for them. Kyiv is much closer to Moscow than Havana is to Washington. If it were justifiable for JFK to give the ultimatum regarding missiles in Cuba, is it not justifiable that Russia would object to Ukraine being a part of a hostile military alliance?
Different Responses
In 1962 the US and Soviet Union realized that escalating tensions and hostilities must be avoided, and they turned to negotiations. They found a mutually acceptable compromise.
The situation seems more dangerous today. Instead of seeking an end to the war, the US and NATO are pouring in weapons and encouraging more bloodshed. It appears to be a proxy war with the US prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian. There are calls to escalate the conflict.
Ukraine Background
Knowing the background to the current crisis is essential to understanding Putin’s actions. Unknown to most Americans, a crucial event came in 2014 when a violent US supported coup overthrew the democratically elected Ukraine government. US State Department official Victoria Nuland handed out cookies as Senator John McCain encouraged the anti-government protesters. In a secretly captured conversation with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland selected who would run the government after the pending coup. In the final days, opposition snipers killed 100 people on both sides to inflame the situation and “midwife” the coup. Oliver Stone’s video “Ukraine on Fire” describes the background and events.
On the first day in power, the coup government issued a decree that removed Russian as a state language.
Within weeks Crimea organized a referendum. With 85% participation, 96% voted to leave Ukraine and re-unite with Russia. Why did they do this? Because most Crimeans speak Russian as their first language and Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783. When Soviet premier Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, they were all within the Soviet Union.
In Odessa, anti-coup protesters were attacked by ultra-nationalist thugs with 48 killed including many burned alive as they sought escape in the Trade Unions Hall. In eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbass, the majority of the population also opposed the ultra-nationalist coup government. Civil war broke out, with thousands killed.
With the participation of France, Germany, the Kiev government, and eastern Ukraine rebels, an agreement was reached and approved by the United Nations Security Council. It was called the Minsk Agreement. Russia has repeatedly encouraged the implementation of this agreement. Instead of negotiations and peace, the Kyiv government and NATO have done the opposite. Since 2015, there have been more weapons, more threats, more NATO training, more encouragement of ultra-nationalism plus NATO military exercises explicitly designed to threaten and antagonize Russia. This is not speculation; it is described in a 2019 Rand report about “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”.
Endangering the world
The Biden administration appears to want to prolong the conflict in Ukraine. President Biden declared in a “gaffe” that Putin must be replaced. Defense Secretary Austin has said the US goal is to “weaken Russia”. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks Afghanistan in the 1980’s is a “model” to follow in Ukraine by bogging Russia down in a protracted war. Republican and Democratic senators Graham and Blumenthal visited Kyiv on July 7 and called for sending even more weapons. There is evidence that the US and UK have been advising Ukrainian president Zelensky to NOT negotiate.
The Need for Courage and Compromise
With war and bloodshed happening now, we need cooler heads to prevail as in 1962. We can have a LOSE – LOSE situation, endangering the whole world, or a compromise which guarantees Ukrainian independence while providing security assurances to Russia.
JFK had the courage and wisdom to resist the CIA and military generals who wanted to escalate the crisis. Does Joe Biden? There is a huge difference between the two presidents. JFK knew war first hand. He was injured and his brother died in WW2. He became an advocate for peace. It may have cost him his life, but millions of people were saved. In contrast, Joe Biden has been a proponent for every US war of the past three decades. Not only that, he was a major player in the 2014 Ukraine coup and aftermath.
Since Biden appointed the chief architect of the Ukraine coup, Victoria Nuland, to be the third top official at the State Department, one cannot realistically expect a change in policy from this administration. Neo-cons are in charge.
If we are to avoid disaster, others must speak up and demand negotiations and settlement before the situation spirals out of control.
BBCmaps showing separatist-held territories in the Donbas before the Russian invasion, and Russian-held territories now.
Article 1 of the UN Charter says that one of the purposes of the UN is “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” However, what “self-determination” means in specific international legal cases is far from a settled debate. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute explains that
contemporary notions of self-determination usually distinguish between “internal” and “external” self-determination, suggesting that “self-determination” exists on a spectrum. Internal self-determination may refer to various political and social rights; by contrast, external self-determination refers to full legal independence/secession for the given “people” from the larger politico-legal state.
Donbas seeks self-rule
This question is germane to the war in Ukraine. The most intense fighting in the country is currently in the Donbas, a region in Ukraine’s east that largely consists of Russian speakers. Immediately before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Russian government announced it was recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, the Donbas’ two major regions, as independent states. They have been warzones since 2014, when Russia-aligned separatists began fighting Ukraine’s central government after the success of the US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government.
Washington Post (5/11/14): “The lines of voters appeared to reflect a significant protest vote against the central government in Kiev.”
In April 2014, separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk declared the territories’ independence. The next month, they held a referendum on self-rule. The Washington Post (5/11/14) reported that people voted more than once at a polling station in Mariupol, and that the way the referendum was administered allowed for the possibility of further fraud; at the same time, the paper also noted that Donetsk and Luhansk residents “turned out in significant numbers…to vote in support of self-rule.” Here “self-rule” could mean the regions having greater autonomy within Ukraine, becoming independent countries on their own, or joining Russia.
Ukraine’s government and its Western backers saw the vote as illegal. Ukraine’s military
generally allowed balloting to proceed…. But Ukrainian national guardsmen shut down the voting in the eastern city of Krasnoarmeysk and later fired into a crowd outside the town hall, wire services reported. The Associated Press said one of its photographers saw two people lying motionless on the ground after the clash.
The Post noted that despite the flawed voting process,
many people here—at least those who voted—will see it as a powerful expression of popular will. At the very least, the lines of voters appeared to reflect a significant protest vote against the central government in Kiev….
It did appear that turnout was relatively high. Journalists from several Western news organizations interviewed 186 residents in the Donetsk region, away from polling stations, and found that 116 had cast ballots or intended to. A total of 122 favored self-determination. The results were not scientific, but reflected the level of interest in the referendum.
The Kosovo precedent
Sarang Shidore (Responsible Statecraft, 2/22/22): “NATO proactively waged a 78-day war against Yugoslavia to ensure its break up and the creation of a new nation state.”
Non-Western media outlets (Asia Times, 2/28/22; Balkan Insight, 3/9/22) have identified a precedent for Russia citing Donetsk and Luhansk’s right to self-determination as a rationale for attacking Ukraine: the Kosovo War. In 1999, NATO conducted a 78-day war that helped to dismember Yugoslavia and create a new state, Kosovo, a Serbian province whose population was 90% ethnic Albanians. Sarang Shidore (Responsible Statecraft, 2/22/22) summarized the Kosovo/Donbas parallel thusly:
Kosovo [was] repressed in the past by Milosevic’s Serbia. NATO’s war resulted in major atrocities and ethnic cleansing of the minority Serb and Roma populations by the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, as well as persecution of the Serbs who inhabit the sliver of a territory in the border region of Mitrovica. Yet the demands of the Serb population in Mitrovica to secede from Kosovo and merge their tiny region into neighboring Serbia is seen as an unacceptable transgression.
Why is there one…standard for Kosovar Albanians and another for Kosovar Serbs?… Should it be a surprise that Ukrainian Russians are just the latest subjects of this list?…
Ethnic Russians in Ukraine mostly support Moscow, and their cultural and linguistic rights have been increasingly violated by a nationalistic government in Kyiv. This has been used by Russia as a means to intervene and create new facts on the ground.
The linguistic discrimination to which Shidore points is a January 2021 law that mandated using Ukrainian in the service industry—obligating, for example, shops and restaurants “to engage customers in Ukrainian unless clients specifically ask to switch.” This law followed 2019 legislation that required middle schools that taught in Russian and other minority languages switch to Ukrainian (France 24, 4/1/21).
In addition, Donbas residents endured violence and bigotry from the Ukrainian government following the start of the 2014 war. James Carden of The Nation (4/6/15) reported that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cut Donbas residents off from social services and benefits. He also blocked them from using the banking system, preventing them from accessing credit “or even the most rudimentary banking services,” such that commerce “ground to a standstill.” According to Carden, the Ukrainian state shelled Donbas civilians and deployed snipers, while “the Kiev government and its representatives in Kiev have repeatedly attempted to dehumanize [Donbas residents] by referring to them as ‘terrorists’ and as ‘subhumans.’”
While Russia is the only country that formally recognizes Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, 117 of the 195 countries in the world recognize Kosovo—which means that 78 countries do not, including major world powers like Russia and China, as well as Western European nations like Spain and Greece (Deutsche Welle, 6/10/22).
The Kosovo/Donbas parallel may be inexact, but it has merit. In each case, residents were subjected to violence and discrimination, and a substantial portion of them expressed a desire to exercise their right to self-determination; in both Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, an outside power attempted to justify a military assault by saying that it needed to rescue a minority population from persecution.
One crucial difference, of course, is that the Ukrainian government is supported by the US, while Donbas residents seeking self-determination are allied with Russia and Russia did the invading in the name of supposed humanitarianism; in contrast, the Yugoslavian government was backed by Russia, whereas Kosovars seeking self-determination were supported by the US, which invaded Yugoslavia allegedly for humanitarian reasons.
My purpose here is not to adjudicate the self-determination or independence claims of the people of Kosovo or the Donbas (though I see pro-independence arguments as highly questionable in both cases, and think neither of the related military interventions was just). Rather, my aim is to investigate whether there were significant differences in how corporate media covered the Kosovo and Donbas cases despite their similarities.
As a barometer of possible US media bias in favor of the home team, I examined how often Kosovars’ right to self-determination was cited in New York Times and Washington Post coverage of Kosovans’ independence claims, and compared it to the frequency with which self-determination was considered in the context of Donetsk and Luhansk’s independence claims. Invoking a peoples’ right to self-determination can function as a way of legitimizing their independence claims: Doing so suggests that those who are attempting to create an independent state are merely trying to shape their own destiny. (Even mentioning the term “self-determination” arguably carries the message that those who are seeking to create their own state have a plausible claim, even if that claim is not explicitly endorsed.)
I looked at how the Kosovo and Donbas independence claims were handled in the coverage of the years leading up to and during the wars in both places. To gauge how often the media have discussed the possibility that Donetsk and Luhansk have the right to self-determination in the years immediately preceding and since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I examined the last five years of coverage. One New YorkTimes piece in that period—an article in the New York Times Magazine (1/16/22)—included the word “self-determination.” However, it was not used in reference to Donetsk and Luhansk: It was used to describe the motive of a Russian fighting on the Ukrainian side in the Donbas who wanted to protect Ukrainian independence from Russia.
‘Pretext’ and ‘sham’
A Washington Post op-ed (2/25/22) noted that “it is so unusual for one country to so brazenly attack another’s political independence and territorial sovereignty today”—but NATO’s 1998 attack on Serbia, with similar justifications, was not offered as a precedent.
My search of the Post yielded similar results. Three Post articles in the last five years mentioned Donetsk, Luhansk and “self-determination,” but not to consider the territories’ assertation that they have this right. One piece (3/18/22) said that Ukraine “aspir[es] to prosperity and self-determination through memberships in NATO and the European Union.” Another (2/25/22) said that in 2014,
there was the pretext of the Crimean “declaration of independence” and subsequent deployment of a self-determination justification for Crimea’s becoming part of Russia. Likewise, by recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia is setting itself up to use a (sham) vote to justify irredentism—claiming these territories based on historical and ethnic ties.
The referendum may have been flawed but, as the Post reported at the time, people in the Donbas “turned out in significant numbers…to vote in support of self-rule,” and leaving that out makes the notion of people in the Donbas region exercising their right to self-determination sound less plausible than might otherwise be the case.
the [UN] Security Council remains a critical venue for smaller countries to affirm and argue directly for the UN Charter’s core principles of sovereign nonintervention and the equal self-determination of peoples.
It went on to describe Kenyan ambassador Martin Kimani “decr[ying] Russia’s recognition of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent states.”
‘In the interests of the West’
In sum, both the Times and the Post declined to present readers with any information that might encourage them to have an open mind about Donetsk and Luhansk’s self-determination claims. In fact, the papers failed to even mention that there are “significant numbers” of people in these territories saying that they have a right to self-determination that they wish to exercise. Here we have a case of a self-determination claim that accords with Russian interests, and diverges from the US position, being concealed from the public.
Kosovars’ self-determination and independence claims, which lined up with US interests and contradicted Russia’s, received far more of a hearing. From 1995–99, the five years leading up to and including NATO bombing campaign, the Times published 22 articles with the words “self-determination” and “Kosovo,” “Kosovar” or related variations. The Post ran 32.
That’s not to say that every piece necessarily offered the view that Kosovo had a right to exercise self-determination, up to and including statehood. However, the idea that it did was treated as legitimate and worthy of debate, in a way that has not happened with Donetsk and Luhansk. Many of the articles did, in fact, back Kosovars’ self-determination claims.
Noel Malcolm wrote in the Times (6/9/99) that Kosovo becoming independent is
in the interests of the West. It is certainly the strong preference of the Kosovo Albanians themselves, who voted overwhelmingly for independence as long ago as 1991. It is what the volunteer soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army were fighting for; without some assurance on eventual self-determination, they will be very reluctant to give up their weapons.
The Post’s Charles Krauthammer (6/17/99) contended that
the case for [Kosovo’s] independence is not just practical but principled. If the overwhelming Albanian majority wants self-determination, democratic principles . . . should allow them to have what they want.
Only part of the story
Thus the coverage that I studied evinced a willingness to treat the notion of Kosovar self-determination seriously, and to explicitly support independence in some instances, and did not present the possibility of Donetsk and Luhansk’s having self-determination rights as something that readers should consider when formulating their perspectives on the present war in Ukraine. Articles outright endorsing Kosovar independence carry the added message, stated or unstated, that the US had at least a reasonable case for militarily intervening in the former Yugoslavia in the name of the Kosovars’ cause.
Greg Shupak (Canadian Dimensions, 3/18/22): “Had the US seriously pursued peace, Minsk II could have both ended the war in Donbas and extinguished the NATO issue that was a driving factor in the invasion Russia launched.”
On the other hand, failing to draw readers’ attention to Donbas residents’ self-determination arguments means offering audiences a one-dimensional view of the war in Ukraine: It presents it solely as an illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, rather than as also an internal Ukrainian conflict in which eastern Ukrainians have legitimate grievances against Kyiv. This omission is significant, considering that the US discouraged negotiations that could have resolved outstanding issues surrounding the Donbas’ position in Ukraine before Russia’s February intervention (Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).
Another period of coverage is also revealing. Kosovo declared its independence on February 17, 2008. That month, the New YorkTimes published four articles containing some versions of the word “Kosovo” and the word “self-determination.” The WashingtonPost also ran a 2008 article (2/17/08) containing both terms, though it did not explicitly state whether it believed that Kosovars have that right. In April 2014, the month that separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence, 11 Times articles mentioned the territories, but none said anything about “self-determination.” The Post published 12 articles on the matter, without mentioning “self-determination” in any.
As people go on dying in eastern Ukraine and the region is leveled, an American public that the corporate media have given only part of the story is more likely to acquiesce to Washington inundating Ukraine with weapons to keep the war going (Bloomberg, 6/23/22; FAIR.org, 3/22/22) than to press for a diplomatic approach to ending the death and destruction as quickly as possible.
Boris Johnson resigning would only be interesting in an alternate universe where there was some remote chance that he won’t be replaced by another depraved sociopath.
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Remember when rich people were so worried about Jeremy Corbyn raising their taxes that they spent months pretending to believe he was a closet Nazi? They really committed to the bit, too. You weren’t even allowed to call it a bit because they’d start saying you’re a Nazi for defending a Nazi. It was wild.
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1. Use narrative manipulation to divide the population into a roughly 50/50 ideological split.
2. Ensure you control both of those factions.
3. Convince everyone that the only reason nothing changes is because their half of the population doesn’t win enough elections.
Everyone’s pulling on a rope that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t do anything, convinced by powerful manipulators that they’re engaged in a life-or-death tug o’ war match of existential importance. Meanwhile the powerful just do as they like, completely indifferent to that spectacle and its back-and-forth exchanges.
A group is artificially split into two sides and told to pull a rope in opposite directions while someone else stands back and shoots them all with a BB gun. When they complain about the welts, they’re told it’s happening because their side isn’t pulling hard enough. But really they’d be getting shot no matter what they did.
This doesn’t mean give up, it just means give up on the fake tug o’ war game. If you’re playing tug o’ war while someone rummages through your handbag looking for cash, the first step to stopping them is putting down the rope and going after them. It’s like if everyone was pushing on a fake fire escape in a burning building: the first step to getting them out of there is showing them that the door is just painted on the wall and doesn’t lead anywhere. That’s not telling them to give up hope, it’s just telling them to give up on an ineffective strategy.
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Every claim the western “rules-based international order” makes about itself and its values has been discredited by the persecution of Julian Assange.
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Current US and NATO proxy warfare in Ukraine isn’t sufficient to defeat Russia, or even to stop Putin from continuing to capture territory in eastern Ukraine. All it’s sufficient for is making the war costly for Moscow while Ukrainians keep dying. That’s because this is exactly what the empire wants.
“I care about Ukrainians, so I support a negotiated settlement” is a morally coherent position.
“I care about Ukrainians, so I support direct hot war with Russia” is also morally coherent, if insane.
“I care about Ukrainians, so let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing” is not morally coherent at all.
It makes sense to support a negotiated peace settlement if you want to save Ukrainian lives. In a twisted, deranged sense it also makes sense to support direct NATO intervention against Russia to save Ukrainian lives. But continuing with the current plan clearly does not make sense as a strategy for saving Ukrainian lives, because it just keeps getting them killed.
I of course point this out not to advocate a third world war, but to show that the western empire does not care about Ukrainian lives and isn’t doing what it claims to be doing with its proxy warfare in that country. If the empire cared even the slightest whit about Ukrainian lives it would be drastically changing its approach, one way or the other. The fact that it’s just maintaining the status quo of continuous death is their confession that they only care about grand chessboard maneuverings for global control, not the actual people who are fighting and dying.
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One funny thing about Twitter is that the target audience for most posts made by blue-check journalists and pundits is not their followers but other blue-check journalists and pundits. Western news media is just one big circle jerk of bootlicking assholes seeking validation from other bootlicking assholes.
That’s why so many of their tweets get so little traction but they’ll still have one or two blue-ticks chuckling at their esoteric witticisms and obscure references in the replies; it’s because they’re tweeting for each other, not for normal people. And that’s how the entire profession works.
The Pulitzers are just a bunch of propagandists giving each other trophies and assuring each other they’re doing brave and important work. Meanwhile the public just gets more and more disgusted with them, but they don’t care because their validation doesn’t come from the public. They complain that they don’t get enough respect when in reality they get far too much. They’re absolutely the worst people on earth. A bunch of worthless, simpering sycophants, the whole lot of them.
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On June 28-30, 2022, NATO leaders gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the major issues and challenges facing the alliance. The summit ended with far-reaching decisions that will have a dire impact on global peace and security. Hailed as “historic,” the summit was indeed transformative: NATO produced a new Strategic Concept and identified what it says are the key threats to western security, interests, and values — none other than Russia and China.
“The empire doesn’t rest,” quips Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, in his assessment of NATO’s “historic” summit in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Chomsky is one of the most widely cited scholars in modern history. He is institute professor emeritus at MIT and currently laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as was expected, the war in Ukraine dominated the recent NATO summit in Madrid and produced some extraordinary decisions which will lead to the “NATO-ization of Europe,” as Russia was declared “the most significant and direct threat” to its members’ peace and security. Turkey dropped its objections to Finland and Sweden joining the alliance after it managed to extract major concessions, NATO’s eastern flank will receive massive reinforcement, additional defense systems will be stationed in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, and the U.S. will boost its military presence all across European soil. Given all of this, is it Russia that represents a threat to Europe, or NATO to Russia? And what does the “NATO-ization” of Europe mean for global peace and security? Is it a prelude to World War III?
We can dismiss the obligatory boilerplate about high principles and noble goals, and the rank hypocrisy: for example, the lament about the fate of the arms control regime because of Russian-Chinese disruption, with no mention of the fact it is the U.S. that has torn it to shreds under W. Bush and particularly Trump. All of that is to be expected in “historic” pronouncements of a new Strategic Concept for NATO.
The Ukraine war did indeed provide the backdrop for the meeting of NATO powers — with bitter irony, just after the conclusion of the first meeting of the states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which passed unnoticed.
The NATO summit was expanded for the first time to include the Asian “sentinel states” that the U.S. has established and provided with advanced high-precision weapons to “encircle” China. Accordingly, the North Atlantic was officially expanded to include the newly created Indo-Pacific region, a vast area where security concerns for the Atlanticist powers of NATO are held to arise. The imperial implications should be clear enough. There’s a good deal more to say about this. I will return to it.
U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia was strongly affirmed in the Strategic Concept: no negotiations, only war to “weaken Russia.”
This has been steady policy since George W. Bush’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, vetoed by France and Germany, who agreed with high-level U.S. diplomats for the past 30 years that no Russian government could tolerate that, for reasons too obvious to review. The offer remained on the agenda in deference to U.S. power.
After the Maidan uprising in 2014, the U.S. began openly to move to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command, policies extended under Biden, accompanied by official acknowledgment after the invasion that Russian security concerns, meaning NATO membership, had not been taken into consideration. The plans have not been concealed. The goals are to ensure full compatibility of the Ukrainian military with NATO forces in order to “integrate Ukraine into NATO de facto.”
Zelensky’s efforts to implement a diplomatic settlement were ignored, including his proposals last March to accept Austrian-style neutralization for the indefinite future. The proposals, which had indications of Russian support, were termed a “real breakthrough” by UN Secretary-GeneralAntónio Guterres, but never pursued.
The official Russian stance at the time (March 2022) was that its military operations would end if Ukraine too were to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognize the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”
There was a considerable gap between the Ukrainian and Russian positions on a diplomatic settlement, but they might have been narrowed in negotiations. Even after the invasion, it appears that there may have remained some space for a way to end the horrors.
France and Germany continued to make overtures toward diplomatic settlement. These are completely dropped in the recent Strategic Concept, which simply “reaffirms” all plans to move toward incorporating Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, formally dismissing Russian concerns.
The shifts in the European stance reflect Europe’s increasing subordination to the U.S. The shift was accelerated by Putin’s choice of aggression after refusing to consider European initiatives that might have averted the crime and possibly even opened a path toward Europe-Russia accommodation that would be highly beneficial to all — and highly beneficial to the world, which may not survive great power confrontation.
That is not a throw-away line. It is reality. The great powers will either find a way to cooperate, to work together in confronting imminent global threats, or the future will be too grim to contemplate. These elementary facts should be kept firmly in mind while discussing particular issues.
We should also be clear about the import of the new Strategic Concept. Reaffirming the U.S. program of de facto incorporation of Ukraine within NATO is also reaffirming, unambiguously, the refusal to contemplate a diplomatic settlement. It is reaffirming the Ramstein declarations a few weeks ago that the war in Ukraine must be fought to weaken Russia, in fact to weaken it more severely than the Versailles treaty weakened Germany, if we assume that U.S. officials mean what they say — and we can expect that adversaries take them at their words.
The Ramstein declarations were accompanied by assurances that Ukraine would drive Russia out of all Ukrainian territory. In assessing the credibility of these assurances, we may recall that they come from the sources that confidently predicted that the U.S.-created Iraqi and Afghan armies would resist ISIS [also known as Daesh] and the Taliban, instead of collapsing immediately, as they did; and that the Russian invasion would conquer Kyiv and occupy Ukraine in three days.
The message to Russia is: You have no escape. Either surrender, or continue your slow and brutal advance, or, in the event that defeat threatens, go for broke and destroy Ukraine, as of course you can.
The logic is quite clear. So is the import beyond Ukraine itself. Millions will face starvation, the world will continue to march toward environmental destruction, the likelihood of nuclear war will increase.
But we must pursue this course to punish Russia severely enough so that it cannot undertake further aggression.
We might pause for a moment to look at the crucial underlying premise: Russia is bent on further aggression, and must be stopped now, or else. Munich 1938. By now this has become a Fundamental Truth, beyond challenge or inquiry. With so much at stake, perhaps we may be forgiven for breaking the rules and raising a few questions.
Inquiry at once faces a difficulty. There has been little effort to establish the Fundamental Truth. As good a version as any is presented by Peter Dickinson, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert Service.The heart of Dickinson’s argument is this:
Putin has never made any secret of the fact that he views the territory of modern Ukraine as historically Russian land. For years, he has denied Ukraine’s right to exist while claiming that all Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”). The real question is which other sovereign nations might also fit Putin’s definition. He recently set off alarm bells by commenting thatthe entire former Soviet Unionwas historically Russian territory.
Nor is it clear if Putin’s appetite for reclaiming Russian lands is limited to the 14 non-Russian post-Soviet states. Imperial Russia once also ruled Finland and Poland, while the Soviet Empire after WWII stretched deep into Central Europe and included East Germany. One thing is clear: unless he is stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand.
That is clear, requiring no further argument.
The totality of evidence is given in the linked article. But now another problem arises. In it, Putin says nothing remotely like what set off the dramatic alarm bells. More like the opposite.
Putin says that the old Soviet Union “ceased to exist,” and he wants “to emphasise that in recent history we have always treated the processes of sovereignisation that have occurred in the post-Soviet area with respect.” As for Ukraine, “If we had had good allied relations, or at least a partnership between us, it would never have occurred to anybody [to resort to force]. And, by the way, there would have been no Crimea problem. Because if the rights of the people who live there, the Russian-speaking population, had been respected, if the Russian language and culture had been treated with respect, it would never have occurred to anybody to start all this.”
Nothing more is quoted. That’s the totality of evidence Dickinson presents, apart from what has become the last resort of proponents of the thesis that unless “stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand”: musings of no clear import about Peter the Great.
This is no minor matter. On this basis, so our leaders instruct us, we must ensure that the war continues in order to weaken Russia; and beyond Ukraine itself, to drive millions to starvation while we march on triumphantly toward an unlivable earth and face increasing risk of terminal nuclear war.
Perhaps there is some better evidence for what is so “clear” that we must assume these incredible risks. If so, it would be good to hear it.
Putin’s cited remarks, as distinct from the fevered constructions, are consistent with the historical and diplomatic record, including the post-invasion Russian official stance just quoted, but much farther back.
The core issue for 30 years has been Ukraine’s entry into NATO. That has always been understood by high U.S. officials, who have warned Washington against the reckless and provocative acts it has been taking. It has also been understood by Washington’s most favored Russian diplomats. Clinton’s friend Boris Yeltsin objected strenuously when Clinton began the process of NATO expansion in violation of firm promises to Gorbachev when the Soviet Union collapsed. The same is true of Gorbachev himself, who accused the West and NATO of destroying the structure of European security by expanding its alliance. “No head of the Kremlin can ignore such a thing,” he said, adding that the U.S. was unfortunately starting to establish a “mega empire,” words echoed by Putin and other Russian officials.
I am unaware of a word in the record about plans to invade anyone outside the long-familiar red lines: Ukraine and Georgia. The only Russian threats that have been cited are that if NATO advances to its borders, Russia will strengthen its defenses in response.
With specific regard to Ukraine, until recently Putin was calling publicly for implementation of the Minsk II agreement: neutralization of Ukraine and a federal arrangement with a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region. It is always reasonable to suspect dark motives in great power posturing, but it is the official positions that offer a basis for diplomacy if there is any interest in that course.
On Crimea, Russia had made no moves until it was about to lose its sole warm water naval base, in the Crimean Peninsula. The background is reviewed by John Quigley, the U.S. State department representative in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] delegation that considered the problem of Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Crimea, he reports, was a particular focus of attention. His intensive efforts to find a solution for the problem of Crimea faced a “dilemma.” Crimea’s population “was majority Russian and saw no reason to be part of Ukraine.” Crimea had been Russian until 1954, when, for unknown reasons, Soviet Communist Party Chair Nikita Khrushchev decided to switch Crimea from the Soviet Russian republic to the Soviet Ukrainian republic. As Quigley notes,
Even after 1954, Crimea was effectively governed more from Moscow than from Kyiv. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, Crimea’s population suddenly found itself a minority in a foreign country. Ukraine accepted a need for a certain degree of self-rule, but Crimea declared independence as what it called the Crimean Republic. Over Ukraine’s objection, an election for president was called in the declared Crimean Republic, and a candidate was elected on a platform of merger with Russia. At the time, however, the Russian government was not prepared to back the Crimeans.
Quigley sought a compromise that would provide autonomy for Crimea under a Ukraine-Crimea treaty, with international guarantees to protect Crimea from Ukrainian infringement. The “treaty went nowhere, however…. Ukraine cracked down on the Crimean Republic, and the conflict remained unresolved. Tension simmered until 2014, by which time Russia was prepared to act to take Crimea back. Crimea was then formally merged into the Russian Federation.”
It’s not a simple matter of unprovoked Russian aggression, as in the received U.S. version.
Like many others familiar with the region, Quigley now calls for a diplomatic settlement and wonders whether the current U.S. goal “is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
Is there still an option for diplomacy? No one can know unless the possibility is explored. That will not happen if it is an established Fundamental Truth that Putin’s ambitions are insatiable.
Apart from the question of Putin’s ambitions, there is a small matter of capability. While trembling in fear of the new Peter the Great, western powers are also gloating over the demonstration that their firm convictions about Russia’s enormous military power were quickly dispelled with the Russian debacle in its attack on Kyiv. U.S. intelligence had predicted victory in a few days. Instead, tenacious Ukrainian resistance revealed that Russia could not conquer cities a few miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army.
But no matter: The new Peter the Great is on the march. Lack of evidence of intention and official proposals to the contrary are as irrelevant to Fundamental Truth as lack of military capacity.
What we are observing is nothing new. Russian devils of incomparable might aiming to conquer the world and destroy civilization have been a staple of official rhetoric, and obedient commentary, for 75 years. The rhetoric of the critical internal document NSC-68 (1950) is a striking illustration, almost unbelievable in its infantile crudity.
At times, the method has been acknowledged. From his position as “present at the creation” of the Cold War, the distinguished statesman Dean Acheson recognized that it was necessary to be “clearer than truth” in exercises (like NSC-68) to “bludgeon the mass mind” of government into obedience with elite plans. That was in fact “NSC-68’s purpose.”
Scholarship has also occasionally recorded the fact. Harvard Professor of Government and long-time government adviser Samuel Huntington observed that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine,”
Today’s formula is no innovation.
We often tend to forget that the U.S. is a global power. Planning is global: What is happening in one part of the world is often replicated elsewhere. By focusing on one particular manifestation, we often miss the global tapestry in which it is one strand.
When the U.S. took over global hegemony from Britain after World War II, it kept the same guiding geopolitical concepts, now greatly expanded by a far more powerful hegemon.
Britain is an island off the coast of Europe. A primary goal of British imperial rule was to prevent a unified hostile Europe.
The U.S.-run western hemisphere is an “island” off the coast of the Eurasian land mass, with far grander imperial objectives (or “responsibilities,” as they are politely termed). It must therefore make sure to control it from all directions, North being a new arena of conflict as global warming opens it up to exploitation and commerce. The NATO-based Atlanticist system is the Western bulwark. The Strategic Concept and its ongoing implementation places this bulwark more firmly in Washington’s hands, thanks to Putin.
With virtually no notice, there are similar developments on the Eastern flank of the Eurasian land mass as NATO extends its reach to the Indo-Pacific region under the new Concept. NATO is deepening its relations with its island partners off the coast of China — Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand — even inviting them to the NATO summit, but much more significant, enlisting them in the “encirclement” of China that is a key element of current bipartisan U.S. strategy.
While the U.S. is firming up its control of the western flank of the Eurasian landmass at the NATO Summit, it is carrying out related exercises at the eastern flank: the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) programs now underway. Under the direction of the U.S. Navy, these are “the grandest of all war games,” Australian political scientist Gavan McCormack writes, “the largest air, land, and sea war manoeuvres in the world. They would assemble a staggering 238 ships, 170 aircraft, 4 submarines and 25,000 military personnel from 26 countries.… To China, scarcely surprisingly these exercises are seen as expression of an anti-China ‘Asian NATO design.’ They are war games, and they are to include various simulations engaging ‘enemy forces,’ attacking targets and conducting amphibious landings on Hawaii Island and in Hawaiian waters.”
RIMPAC is supplemented by regular U.S. naval missions in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). These are merely “innocent passage” in accord with the principle of “freedom of navigation;” the U.S. protests when China objects, as does India, Indonesia, and many others. The U.S. appeals to the Law of the Sea – which bars threat or use of force in these zones. Quietly, the U.S. client state Australia, of course, in coordination with Washington, is engaged in “military espionage” in the EEZ, installing highly sophisticated sensing devices “so that the U.S. can more effectively destroy Chinese vessels as quickly as possible at the start of any conflict.”
These exercises on the Eastern Flank are accompanied by others in the Pacific Northeast region and, in part, in the Baltic region, with participation of new NATO members Finland and Sweden. Over the years, they have been slowly integrated into the NATO military system and have now taken the final step, pleading “security concerns” that are scarcely even laughable but do benefit their substantial military industries and help drive the societies to the right.
The empire doesn’t rest. The stakes are too high.
In official rhetoric, as always, these programs are undertaken for benign purposes: to enforce “the rules-based international order.” The term appears repeatedly in the Strategic Concept of the NATO Summit. Missing from the document is a different phrase: “UN-based international order.” That is no accidental omission: The two concepts are crucially different.
The UN-based international order is enshrined in the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law. Under the U.S. Constitution (Article VI), the UN Charter is also “the supreme law of the land.” But it is unacceptable to U.S. elite opinion and is violated freely, with no notice, by U.S. presidents.
The Charter has two primary flaws. One is that it bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, apart from designated circumstances that almost never arise. That means that it bans U.S. foreign policy, obviously an unacceptable outcome. Consequently, the revered Constitution can be put aside. If, unimaginably, the question of observing the Constitution ever reached the Supreme Court, it would be dismissed as a “political question.”
The rules-based international order overcomes this flaw. It permits the threat and use of force freely by the Master, and those he authorizes. Illustrations are so dramatically obvious that one might think that they would be difficult to ignore. That would be a mistake: they are routinely ignored. Take one of the major international crimes: annexation of conquered territory in violation of international law. There are two examples: Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in violation of the ruling of the International Court of Justice, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria and Greater Jerusalem in violation of unanimous Security Council orders. All have been supported by the U.S. for many years, and were formally authorized by the Trump administration, now by Biden. One will have to search hard for expressions of concern, even notice.
The second flaw is that the UN Security Council and other international institutions, like the World Court, set the rules. That flaw is also overcome in the rules-based international order, in which the U.S. sets the rules and others obey.
It is, then, easy to understand Washington’s preference for the rules-based international order, now forcefully affirmed in the NATO Strategic Concept, and adopted in U.S. commentary and scholarship.
Turning elsewhere, we do find serious commentary and analysis. Australian strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes discusses the matter in some depth in his book Sub-Imperial Power (Melbourne 2022).
Tracing the concept to its western origins in British imperial rule, Fernandes shows that
the rules-based order differs sharply from the United Nations–centred international system and the international order underpinned by international law. The United States sits at the apex of the system, exercising control over the sovereignty of many countries. The United Kingdom, a lieutenant with nuclear weapons and far-flung territories, supports the United States. So do subimperial powers like Australia and Israel. The rules-based international order involves control of the effective political sovereignty of other countries, a belief in imperial benevolence and the economics of comparative advantage. Since policy planners and media commentators cannot bring themselves to say ‘empire’, the ‘rules-based international order’ serves as the euphemism.
“The economics of comparative advantage,” as Fernandes discusses, is another euphemism. Its meaning is “stay in your place,” for the benefit of all. It is often advised with the best of intentions. Surely that was the case when Adam Smith advised the American colonies to keep to their comparative advantage in agriculture and import British manufactured goods, thus “promoting the progress of their country toward real wealth and greatness.”
Having overthrown British rule, the colonies were free to reject this kind advice and to resort to the same kinds of radical violation of orthodox free trade principles that Britain used in becoming the world’s great center of manufacturing and global power. That pattern has been replicated with impressive consistency. Those that adopted the favored principle, usually under force, became the third world. Those that violated it became the wealthy first world, including the one country of the South that resisted colonization, Japan, and thus was able to violate the rules and develop, with its former colonies in tow.
The consistency of the record is close to axiomatic. After all, development means changing comparative advantage.
In short, the rules-based order confers many advantages on the powerful. One can easily understand why it is viewed so favorably in their domains, while the UN-based order is dismissed except when it can be invoked to punish enemies.
Turkey continues to resist joining sanctions against Russia and acts, in fact, as a sanctions “safe haven” for Russian oligarchs. Yet it is treated by the U.S. and the NATO alliance in general as a reliable strategic ally, and everyone ignores the fact that Erdoğan’s regime is as blatantly authoritarian and oppressive as that of Putin. In fact, following his somersault vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is now warming up to Erdoğan and wants to upgrade Turkey’s fleet of American-made F-16 fighter jets. How should we interpret this anomalous situation within the NATO alliance? Yet another instance of western hypocrisy or the dictates of Realpolitik?
What is anomalous is that Erdoğan is playing his own game instead of just obeying orders. There’s nothing anomalous about his being “blatantly authoritarian and oppressive.” That’s not a concern [for the U.S.], as in numerous other cases. What is a concern is that he’s not entirely a “reliable strategic ally.” Turkey was actually sanctioned by the U.S. for purchasing Russian missile defense system. And even after the invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan left open whether he would purchase Russian arms or depart from his “friendship” with Mr. Putin. In this particular regard, Turkey is acting more like the Global South than like NATO.
Turkey has departed from strict obedience in other ways. It delayed the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO. The reason, it seems, is Turkey’s commitment to intensify its murderous repression of its Kurdish population. Sweden had been granting asylum to Kurds fleeing Turkish state violence — “terrorists” in Turkish official lingo. There are legitimate concerns that an ugly underground bargain may have been struck when Turkey dropped its opposition to full Swedish entry into NATO.
The background should not be overlooked. Brutal repression of the Kurds in Turkey has a long history. It reached a crescendo in the 1990s, with a state terror campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurds, destroyed thousands of towns and villages, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, many to hideous slums in barely survivable corners of Istanbul. Some were offered the opportunity to return to what was left of their homes, but only if they publicly blamed Kurdish PKK guerrillas. With the amazing courage that has been the hallmark of the Kurdish struggles for justice, they refused.
These terrible crimes, some of the worst of the decade, were strongly supported by the U.S., which poured arms into Turkey to expedite the atrocities. The flow increased under Clinton as the crimes escalated. Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), replacing Colombia, the leading violator of human rights in the Western hemisphere. That extends a long and well-established pattern. As usual, the media cooperated by ignoring the Turkish horrors and crucial U.S. support for them.
By 2000, the crimes were abating, and an astonishing period began in Turkey. There was remarkable progress in opening up the society, condemning state crimes, advancing freedom and justice. For me personally, it was a great privilege to be able to witness it first-hand, even to participate in limited ways. Prominent in this democratic revolution were Turkish intellectuals, who put their western counterparts to shame. They not only protested state crimes but carried out regular civil disobedience, risking and often enduring harsh punishment, and returning to the fray. One striking example was Ismail Beşikçi, who as a young historian was the first non-Kurdish academic to document the horrific repression of the Kurds. Repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, abused, he refused to stop his work, continuing to document the escalating crimes. There were many others.
By the early 2000s it seemed that a new era was dawning. There were some thrilling moments. One unforgettable experience was at the editorial offices of Hrant Dink, the courageous journalist who was assassinated with state complicity for his defense of human rights, particularly the rights of the Armenian community that had been subjected to genocidal slaughter, still officially denied. With his widow, I was standing on the balcony of the office, observing an enormous demonstration honoring Hrant Dink and his work, and calling for an end to ongoing crimes of state, no small act of courage and dedication in the harshly repressive Turkish state.
The hopes were soon to wane as Erdoğan instituted his increasingly brutal rule, moving to restore the nightmare from which Turkey had begun to emerge. All similar to what happened a few years later in the Arab Spring.
Turkey is also extending its aggression in Syria, aimed at the Kurdish population who, in the midst of the horrendous chaos of the Syrian conflicts, had managed to carve out an island of flourishing democracy and rights (Rojava). The Kurds had also provided the ground troops for Washington’s war against ISIS in Syria, suffering over 10,000 casualties. In thanks for their service in this successful war, President Trump withdrew the small U.S. force that served as a deterrent to the Turkish onslaught, leaving them at its mercy.
There is an old Kurdish proverb that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. There is just concern that Turkish-Swedish NATO maneuverings might confirm it.
The NATO summit reached the interesting conclusion that China represents a “security challenge” to the interests and security of its member states, but it is not to be treated as an adversary. Semantics aside, can the West really stop China from exercising an ever-increasing role in global affairs? Indeed, is a unipolar power system a safer alternative to world peace than a bipolar or multipolar system?
The U.S. is quite openly seeking to restrict China’s role in global affairs and to impede its development. These are what constitute the “security challenge.” The challenge thus has two dimensions, roughly what is called “soft power” and “hard power.”
The former is internal development of industry, education, science and technology. This provides the basis for the expansion of China’s arena of influence through such projects as the Belt-and-Road (BRI) initiative, a massive multidimensional project that integrates much of Eurasia within a Chinese-based economic and technological system, reaching to the Middle East and Africa, and even to U.S. Latin American domains.
The U.S. complains, correctly, that Chinese internal development violates the rules-based international order. It does, radically. China is following the practices that the U.S. did, as did England before it and all other developed societies since. China is rejecting the policy of “kicking away the ladder”: First climb the ladder of development by any means available, including robbery of higher technology and ample violence and deceit, then impose a “rules-based order” that bars others from doing the same. That is a staple of modern economic history, now formalized in the highly protectionist investor-rights agreements that are masked under the cynical pretense of “free trade.”
The “security challenge” also has a military dimension. This is countered by the program of “encircling” China by heavily-armed “sentinel states,” and by such projects as the massive RIMPAC exercises now underway, defending the U.S. off the coasts of China. No infringement on U.S. domination of the “Indo-Pacific” region can be tolerated, even a threat that China might set up its second overseas military base in the Pacific Solomon Islands (the first is in Djibouti).
Digressing briefly to criminal “whataboutism,” we might mention that the U.S. has 800 bases worldwide, which, along with their very prominent role in “defense” (aka imperial domination), enable hundreds of “low-profile proxy wars” in Africa, the greater Middle East, and Asia.
Washington, along with concurring commentary in the media and journals of opinion, are quite correct in charging China with violation of the rules-based order that the U.S. upholds, now with even more firm European support than before. They are also correct in deploring severe human rights violations in China, but that is not a concern of the rules-based order, which easily accommodates and commonly vigorously supports such violations.
The question of how best to enhance world peace does not arise in this connection. Everyone is in favor of “peace,” even Hitler: on their own terms. For the U.S., the terms are the rules-based international order. Others have their own ideas. Most of the world is the proverbial grass on which the elephants trample.
The climate crisis was also on the agenda at the three-day summit in Madrid. In fact, it was recognized as “a defining challenge of our time” and NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg informed the world that the organization will “set the gold standard on addressing the security implications of climate change.” Personally, I sure feel better now knowing that militarism can be added to the methods of tackling the climate crisis. How about you?
How encouraging that NATO will address “the security implications of climate change,” where “security” has the usual meaning that excludes the security of people.
The issues raised here are the most important of all and are the most easily summarized. The human species is advancing toward a precipice. Soon irreversible tipping points will be reached, and we will be falling over the precipice to a “hothouse earth” in which life will be intolerable for those remnants that survive.
Military expenses make a double contribution to this impending disaster: first, in their enormous contribution to destroying the conditions for tolerable existence, and second, in the opportunity costs — what isn’t being done with the huge resources devoted to undermining any hope for the future.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine made the same double contribution: destruction and robbery of the resources that must be used to avert environmental destruction. All of this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The window for constructive action is closing while humanity persists on this mad course.
All else pales into insignificance. We will find ways to cooperate to avert disaster and create a better world, as we still can. Or we will bring the human experiment to an inglorious end.
As Russian forces progress across the state of Ukraine seizing ever larger chunks of the country from the control of Kiev, the conflict there may seem remote to countries in the Asia-Pacific region. But the wider impact of the war and its significance has not been lost in Taipei, where the Republic of China’s (ROC’s) […]
Russian forces fighting for control of eastern Ukraine are believed to be preparing for an “operational pause” after taking control of Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbas region that Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to be “liberating” through a devastating war of attrition that has left entire cities in ruin.
Putin claimed a victory for Russia on Monday and gave awards to military brass for seizing the town of Lysychansk on the western border of the Luhansk Oblast. However, former Russian military commander Igor Girkin questioned the significance of the seizing the city in a “scathing” critique of Russia’s performance in the war, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based non-partisan policy research organization.
Girkin, a hardline Russian nationalist who commanded militants during the 2014 war in the contested Donbas, suggested in a blog post that Russian forces have paid too high price for limited gains in Luhansk after weeks of grinding artillery battles and urban combat with U.S.-backed Ukrainian defenders, who are determined to weaken the Russian military and blunt the scope of Putin’s invasion.
A manpower shortage that has left beleaguered Russian soldiers at the front without replacements is badly damaging Russian morale, Girkin wrote. Putin publicly called on his troops around Lysychansk to rest and regroup, which is likely meant to signal concern for troops “in the face of periodic complaints in Russia” about the treatment of the soldiers, according to the ISW. Putin has so far avoided a mass mobilization of military conscripts at home, leaving independent critics such as Girkin frustrated by military failures and the Kremlin’s unwillingness to call up reserves and wage a wider war on Ukraine.
It’s unclear how long the “operational pause” in the invasion would last, but ISW analysts and other experts expect Putin’s forces to continue pushing into the neighboring Donetsk Oblast with punishing artillery assaults. Taking time to replenish offensive capability runs the risk of losing ground to Ukrainian counterattacks, Girkin warned.
Russian troops are reportedly working to establish administrative control of captured territory around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities on either side of the Donets river that suffered bloody street battles and constant artillery barrages. Russian forces could be preparing to forcibly conscript Ukrainian citizens still living there to fight on the side of Russian and its separatist allies, the ISW reports.
After months of indiscriminate shelling by Russian forces and Ukrainian counterattacks, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday that it will cost $750 billion to rebuild towns, cities and civilian infrastructure damaged by the war. International leaders grappled with a plan to rebuild Ukraine at a summit in Switzerland on Monday, with European nations and other Western allies pledging ongoing support.
Beyond Lysychansk, limited Russian ground assaults are resulting in incremental territorial gains as Putin’s army seeks out strategic positions before pushing the invasion further west. Sporadic rocket strikes have terrorized civilian areas in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are using HIMARS missile systems imported from the United States to strike Russian ammunition depots up to 75 kilometers behind the front lines in recent days, a sign of improved military capability after months of facing off with invaders who have superior weapons.
An apparent sabotage campaign targeting Russian-controlled railways continues in occupied Ukraine as well as inside Russia, where partisans and antiwar activists are working to disrupt the Russian army’s supply lines.
The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian partisans blew up a railway bridge between Melitopol and Tokmak in occupied southeastern Ukraine on July 3, and derailed a separate armored train carrying ammunition near Melitopol a day earlier. Previous sabotage efforts were also successful, suggesting a coordinated resistance campaign in these occupied areas, according to ISW.
A self-described “cell” of anarchist militants took responsibility for railway sabotage near a Russian artillery depot in the Vladimir Oblast outside of Moscow. In posts on the social media platform Telegram, the militants claimed the sabotage temporarily stalled a train with military equipment and was meant to show “all the partizans [sic] how accessible such targets for sabotage are.”
President Joe Biden and top subordinates have refused to publicly acknowledge the danger of nuclear war — even though it is now higher than at any other time in at least 60 years. Their silence is insidious and powerful, and their policy of denial makes grassroots activism all the more vital for human survival.
In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was more candid. Speaking at American University, he said: “A single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.” Kennedy also noted, “The deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” Finally, he added, “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”
Kennedy was no dove. He affirmed willingness to use nuclear weapons. But his speech offered some essential honesty about nuclear war — and the need to seriously negotiate with the Kremlin in the interests of averting planetary incineration — an approach sorely lacking from the United States government today.
At the time of Kennedy’s presidency, nuclear war would have been indescribably catastrophic. Now — with large arsenals of hydrogen bombs and what scientists know about “nuclear winter” — experts have concluded that a nuclear war would virtually end agriculture and amount to omnicide (the destruction of human life on earth).
In an interview after publication of his book The Doomsday Machine, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg summed up what he learned as an insider during the Kennedy administration:
What I discovered — to my horror, I have to say — is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then because they weren’t including fire, which they found was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would’ve been over a billion — not 600 million — about a third of the Earth’s population then at that time.
Ellsberg added:
What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983 and confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you call them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine four months ago, the risks of global nuclear annihilation were at a peak. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at a mere 100 seconds from apocalyptic Midnight, compared to six minutes a decade ago. As Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine has persisted and the U.S. government has bypassed diplomacy in favor of massive arms shipments, the hazards of a nuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have increased.
But the Biden administration has not only remained mum about current nuclear war dangers; it’s actively exacerbating them. Those at the helm of U.S. foreign policy now are ignoring the profound lessons that President Kennedy drew from the October 1962 confrontation with Russia over its nuclear missiles in Cuba. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
In sync with the overwhelmingly hawkish U.S. media, members of Congress and “national security” establishment, Biden has moved into new Cold War overdrive. The priority aim is to make shrewd moves on the geopolitical chessboard — not to engage in diplomacy that could end the slaughter in Ukraine and prevent the war from causing widespread starvation in many countries.
As scholar Alfred McCoy just wrote, “With the specter of mass starvation looming for some 270 million people and, as the [United Nations] recently warned, political instability growing in those volatile regions, the West will, sooner or later, have to reach some understanding with Russia.” Only diplomacy can halt the carnage in Ukraine and save the lives of millions now at risk of starvation. And the dangers of nuclear war can be reduced by rejecting the fantasy of a military solution to the Ukraine conflict.
In recent months, the Russian government has made thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been shipping huge quantities of weapons to Ukraine, while Washington has participated in escalating the dangerous rhetoric. President Biden doubled down on conveying that he seeks regime change in Moscow, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has declared that the U.S. wants the Russian military “weakened” — an approach that is opposite from Kennedy’s warning against “confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”
We’d be gravely mistaken to wait for Washington’s officialdom to level with us about nuclear war dangers, much less take steps to mitigate them. The power corridors along Pennsylvania Avenue won’t initiate the needed changes. The initiatives and the necessary political pressure must come from grassroots organizing.
A new “Defuse Nuclear War” coalition of about 90 national and regional organizations (which I’m helping to coordinate) launched in mid-June with a livestream video featuring an array of activists and other eloquent speakers, drawn together by the imperative of preventing nuclear war. (They included antiwar activists, organizers, scholars and writers Daniel Ellsberg, Mandy Carter, David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Pastor Michael McBride, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Hanieh Jodat Barnes, Judith Ehrlich, Khury Petersen-Smith, India Walton, Emma Claire Foley, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and former California Gov. Jerry Brown.)
The U.S. government’s willingness to boost the odds of nuclear war is essentially a political problem. It pits the interests of the people of the world — in desperate need of devoting adequate resources to human needs and protection of the environment — against the rapacious greed of military contractors intertwined with the unhinged priorities of top elected officials.
The Biden administration and the bipartisan leadership in Congress have made clear that their basic approach to the surging danger of nuclear war is to pretend that it doesn’t exist — and to encourage us to do the same. Such avoidance might seem like a good coping strategy for individuals. But for a government facing off against the world’s other nuclear superpower, the denial heightens the risk of exterminating almost all human life. There’s got to be a better way.
Troop cuts, defence budget hikes, billions in military aid and the spectre of war with China. It’s been a busy week for warmongers and war profiteers. British foreign secretary Liz Truss addressed the NATO summit in Madrid to lay out the Tory’s foreign policy vision.
High on the agenda was threatening China. In an interview with Times Radio she said the “free world” had to ensure Taiwan could defend itself:
This is a thing that we’re discussing with our allies.
Lessons of Ukraine
In a keynote speech during the conference, she warned that a miscalculation from China could lead to disaster:
I do think that with China extending its influence through economic coercion and building a capable military, there is a real risk that they draw the wrong idea that results in a catastrophic miscalculation such as invading Taiwan.
Truss drew on the example of Ukraine to highlight why she wanted to increase support for Taiwan. China considers Taiwan, a US ally, part of its territory:
We should have done things earlier. We should have been supplying the defensive weapons into Ukraine earlier.
She added
We need to learn that lesson for Taiwan. Every piece of equipment we have sent takes months of training, so the sooner we do it, the better.
We all need to recognise that warfare now is different to warfare as it was 100 years ago, or 200 years ago.
The thinking seems to be that a move away from conventional military deployments and towards new technological solutions is what is required:
We need to make sure that the defence capability we have is fit for purpose for the modern world – and we face all kinds of new threats, whether it’s cyber threats, threats in space, new technology, new weaponry, and what’s important is the overall shape of those forces.
Unhappy general
The 10,000 cut to troop numbers was not well-received by the head of the army, general Patrick Sanders. In a recent speech he had hyped the threat of Russia, comparing the current political moment to 1937 and the rise of Hitler.
Yesterday, The Times reported that Sanders had been disciplined by Boris Johnson for suggesting the cuts were “perverse”.
The troop cuts row has also come at a time when the UK government has pledged an additional £1bn in military aid to Ukraine. Which, among other things, should be seen as a windfall for arms firms as The Canaryhas argued previously.
UK weapons, equipment and training are transforming Ukraine’s defences against this onslaught.
New trends in war
There is more than an atom of truth in the notion that war has changed forms. Big military deployments are off the menu post-Afghanistan. But it is true of both modes of warfare that there are massive profits to be made.
It can be safely assumed that a large part of the new £1bn package of military aid will go to defence firms. And the general shift away from boots on ground towards new military technology will also fill the coffers of military corporations.
What’s missing, as ever, is any discussion of socially and economically just global security models.
There’s a lot going on in America and the people are very stressed out and frightened, but don’t worry, there’s nothing the US government won’t do to make sure more High Mobility Artillery Rocket systems get to Ukraine.
Rest assured Americans: no matter how dark things may seem right now, no matter how insecure and uncertain you may feel, you can sleep soundly knowing your government is moving mountains around the clock to make sure the Ukraine war becomes a strategic quagmire for Moscow.
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The Ukraine war is the single most aggressively trolled issue I’ve ever witnessed. As soon as it started, Twitter was full of brand new accounts swarming anyone who uttered wrongthink about Ukraine, and now there are entire extremely coordinated troll factions working to scare people away from criticizing empire narratives about this war. It’s plainly very inorganic, so it’s good to recall what we know about the trolling operations of western militaries.
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Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media | Hacking | The Guardian https://t.co/IFH9KsXTxa
How did we miss this year-old Newsweek report about a secret and unaccountable Pentagon "undercover force" which "carries out domestic and foreign assignments" that include "campaigns to influence and manipulate social media"? https://t.co/zo7liETtnnpic.twitter.com/nTibeLpZxH
We're used to hearing about state-backed Twitter campaigns from the likes of Iran and Russia, but why do we never hear about US and UK social media ops? (Spoiler: it's not because they don't exist) https://t.co/Aj7i3LNAZD
So the western empire is responding to a war that was caused by NATO expansion by greatly expanding NATO, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration doesn’t even believe Ukraine has any chance of winning that war. This is going great, guys. Good job everyone.
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Sure the worst case scenario of all this brinkmanship with Russia is nuclear war, but on the other hand the best case scenario is securing planetary domination for an empire that has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression for power and profit. Totally worth the risk!
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When you realize the US really only has one political party, you cease seeing one good party protecting people from a bad party and start seeing one giant party threatening to take away people’s civil rights if they don’t obey and submit. You suddenly understand that saying one party is a “lesser evil” is like saying a boxer should want to get hit by his opponent’s left hand because his right cross hurts more. It’s two arms on the same boxer, and they’re both working together to knock you out.
A boxer doesn’t go into a match planning to get punched in the face by his opponent’s left hand while avoiding the right, he goes in planning to defeat his opponent. The opponent is the uniparty and the oligarchic empire which controls it.
It is true that each hand is used differently in boxing, with the lead used mostly for jabs and hooks and the rear hand mostly for crosses, but they’re both used together to set up a knockout blow. The fact that the parties are used differently doesn’t mean they’re not working together.
Most good boxers will tell you they’d rather fight someone with a solid cross than someone with a solid jab. Sure the jab does less damage at first, but it’s such an effective strike that it can nullify your entire offense and grind you down until you can’t continue. In exactly the same way, the Democratic Party is far more effective in shutting down revolutionary movements and stagnating progress than the Republicans, and, just like a jab-cross combination in boxing, is used to set up the Republicans to deliver the knockout blow.
What is the correct response to this? Is it to say “Hmm, I’d better let him punch me with his left hand, because if I don’t he’ll hit me with his right and it’ll hurt more”? Or is it to bite down on your mouthpiece and start throwing heavy leather until you knock his ass out?
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It’s just a cold hard fact that no matter how strong and independent a woman you think you are, your quality of life will be severely affected by the quality of the person you have babies with. Abortion is the final safeguard against giving birth to the child of an unworthy man. And no matter who you are reading this, you personally know women who’ve been temporarily deceived into thinking they were having sex with a worthy man.
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Forced birthers in the US are like, “We’ll adopt your baby! Okay actually we’ll probably just let them fall through the cracks of a grossly inadequate foster care system leading to a childhood of trauma and neglect, but after that we’ve got a very well-funded prison system that can take care of them.”
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One thing we learned from Covid is that being stuck inside sucks. Space colonization would be like being in permanent lockdown with no windows, no Uber Eats, no birdsong or rain on the roof and no chance of ever going home. Even if it somehow became possible, it’s a dumb idea and I hate it.
And there’s no reason to believe it will ever become possible. Science is nowhere near finished learning about all the countless ways the human organism is inseparably intertwined with Earth. The belief that we can solve our problems with space colonization is unscientific. We’re just going to have to change how we function as a species.
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Astronauts lose decades' worth of bone mass in space that many do not recover even after a year back on Earth, researchers said Thursday, warning that it could be a "big concern" for future missions to Marshttps://t.co/p7Mp9deDih
The biggest obstacle remains the fact that science has no idea how to sustain human life in a way that is separate from earth’s ecosystem. We don’t even have any evidence that it’s possible. We’re no closer to being able to do it than we were a thousand years ago; today’s space stations are not independent of Earth’s ecosystem in even the tiniest way. They’re still 100 percent dependent on terrestrial supplies, which is an unsustainable model if you’re talking about actual colonization.
The idea of space colonization appeals to the capitalist mentality because it means we can keep expanding our population and keep expanding the economy and keep harvesting and consuming resources in the way we have been. But there’s literally zero scientific evidence that it’s feasible.
A future of space colonization is a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we won’t have to change. So we can keep up our egocentric way of functioning without adapting and transcending our self-destructive patterns. We’re like a slacker who refuses to get off their parents’ couch and get their shit together who babbles made-up nonsense about NFT get-rich-quick schemes when asked about their plans for the future.
Collective extinction is easier to imagine than collective ego death.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shakes hands with NTO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, during the NATO Conference in Madrid on 28 June 2022. A handshake of betrayal, as Turkey accepted Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership.
One wonders what forces have influenced Erdogan to betray Russia in particular and the East in general, when accepting NATO membership of the two Nordic countries, against the interests of Russia.
Why would Turkey want to dance on two fiestas, the western lying, deceiving and collapsing NATO / G7+ wannabe empire, and the progressive, growing and peace seeking fast developing East, or better the Greater Global South?
Erdogan is a bit like India’s PM Narendra Modi, who wants to be part of the new expanded eastern alliance, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the ASEAN ten-countries’ block, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as well as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the association of 11 former USSR Republics.
At the same time Modi, like Erdogan would not want to “lose out”, in case the west may not collapse, or not as quickly as it should. Do they not realize that their “misbehavior”, a benign term to camouflage betrayal, is only tolerated in the case of Turkey because of its geostrategic and geographic location, and in the case of India, because of its sheer size – 1.4 billion people, about the same as the most populous country, China?
But, under their current leadership, neither country can be trusted as a reliable ally. Not by the east, and not even in the tarnished west.
Whether the Kremlin had hoped Turkey would stick to her objection against Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO access is immaterial. What counts is that Turkey is no reliable partner and ally for Russia which had already been proven earlier, when Turkey aggressed Syria for her own petty interests, while Russia fought and won Syria’s war against unfounded US aggressions.
“The concrete steps for our accession to NATO will be agreed among NATO allies over the next two days, but that decision is now imminent,” said Finland’s President, Sauli Niinisto. “I am pleased that this stage on Finland’s journey towards NATO membership has been completed.”
According to RT (28 June 2022), Turkey will support inviting Finland and Sweden into NATO at the bloc’s summit in Spain, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto announced on Tuesday after a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.
A note on Sweden and NATO: For over 300 years, Sweden and Russia have lived conflict-free side by side. Entering the aggressive NATO clan means a Swedish aggression against Russia.
The three countries, Sweden, Finland and Turkey, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the NATO meeting on 28 June, organized with the support of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
The MOU stated, for example, that Finland and Sweden pledged to “condemn terrorism in all its forms” and end their support for organizations Ankara has designated as terrorist – including the Kurdish groups PKK and YPG, as well as the movement led by the exiled cleric Fetullah Gulen, Erdogan’s archenemy.
“Turkey got what it wanted,” Erdogan said after the deal was announced.
This was another lie because terrorism from Sweden and Finland were never serious threats to Turkey. They were just used by Erdogan to pressure the NATO / G7 “alliance” into some vital concessions.
Could it be lifting of the killing economic sanctions initiated by Washington and supported by the EU?
Or, could it be, like in the case of Ukraine – a step towards acceding the corrupt and faltering European Union? A Turkish quest that is already at least two decades old.
Maybe the luminary Mme. Ursula von der Leyen, unelected Fuehrer of the European Commission, has the answer.
The United States announced at a NATO summit in Madrid plans to build a permanent military base in Poland, as it formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance after they applied for membership in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We look at the impact of prolonged U.S. military presence in Europe and the overemphasis on Russia or China as enemies to the West at a time when threats to Western liberal democracy seem to be primarily internal. The Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven also discusses possibilities for a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine. “It’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia,” says Lieven. “We’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: The NATO military alliance has wrapped up a major summit in Madrid. On Wednesday, President Biden announced plans to greatly expand the U.S. military presence in Europe, including building a permanent headquarters for the U.S. 5th Army Corps in Poland, while also deploying more troops to Romania and the Baltic region. Biden said this is part of a broader NATO expansion, in part as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: And together, our allies, we’re going to make sure that NATO is ready to meet threats from all directions across every domain — land, air and the sea.
AMYGOODMAN: On Wednesday, NATO formally invited Finland and Sweden to join the military alliance, after Turkey dropped its objection to the move. This comes as the Biden administration has publicly announced it would support the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey.
Once Finland and Sweden join NATO, it will more than double the border between NATO countries and Russia. Current members of NATO share a 750-mile border with Russia. Finland alone has an 830-mile border with Russia.
On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against NATO deploying troops or weapons to the two countries.
PRESIDENTVLADIMIRPUTIN: [translated] There’s nothing that might concern us in terms of Finland and Sweden becoming NATO members. If they want to, please go ahead. But they should clearly understand that they didn’t face any threats before this. Now, if NATO troops and infrastructure are deployed, we will be compelled to respond in kind.
AMYGOODMAN: This all comes as NATO has described China for the first time as a, quote, “systemic challenge to Euro-Atlantic security,” unquote. NATO, which stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is increasingly focusing on China. The military alliance took the unprecedented step of inviting the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.
For more, we turn to Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, author Ukraine and Russia. His latest piece in The Nation is headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.”
Anatol, thanks for joining us again. If you can start off by talking about all these developments? As we’re broadcasting, President Biden is actually holding a news conference in Madrid, but the increased troop presence in Europe, Poland establishing a permanent base, Finland and Sweden coming in to the alliance, and inviting South Korea and Japan, New Zealand and Australia to — not into NATO, but to this meeting, so they can start to talk more about what NATO is considering a threat: China.
ANATOLLIEVEN: Well, that’s a lot to cover. I suppose one thing to note is that, as your report said, I think, today Russia announced that it was withdrawing from Snake Island in the Black Sea on the coast of Ukraine, which it has been occupied since the beginning of the war. And Russia said, of course, it was doing this as a gesture of conciliation, but the general analysis is that Russia was withdrawing from Snake Island because it was simply suffering too many casualties and losses of ships to hold it.
Now, you know, I think what that does indicate pretty clearly is that on top of the way that Russia was defeated by Ukrainian forces with Western weaponry outside Kyiv, has been fought not quite to a standstill, but almost, in eastern Ukraine, you know, Russia is not the — nearly the military great power that the Russians obviously thought it was, but that it was also portrayed as in the West. And, in fact, a former NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has acknowledged this. So you see there is a certain dissonance between Russia’s actual military strength and performance and NATO’s response, because, you know, to be blunt, if Russia takes weeks and weeks to capture one small town in the Donbas, the thought of it invading Poland or Romania, it’s not actually serious in military terms.
And as far as Finland and Sweden is concerned, well, you know, one understands perfectly why they have been so alarmed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it is also true that Russia has not threatened either of them militarily since the end of the Cold War. So I suppose that’s one thing to point to.
I mean, as far as China is concerned, there are, I suppose, two points to raise. The first is that to have set out on a focus on the Chinese threat, while at the same time being deeply embroiled in acute tension with Russia and backing the other side in a war with Russia, you know, does not look like wise strategy for NATO. You know, there should have been some attempt to ratchet down tensions with one or the other.
I suppose the other obvious point to make is, as you said, I mean, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You know, the members of NATO are all on or close to the North Atlantic. The United States is there because it is an Atlantic power. To the best of my knowledge, China is not present in the Atlantic Ocean. And it does raise the question both of whether NATO should — whether NATO’s charter in fact allows it to deal with China as a threat, or whether you should have a quite different organization for that, but also, of course, whether China is actually a threat to the North Atlantic countries or such — as such, or whether it is only in fact a threat to American primacy in the Far East, which is a very different question.
NERMEENSHAIKH: I mean, Anatol, when this announcement was made by NATO to include China, they said that China represents — threatens NATO’s, quote, “interests, security and values.” And together with making this statement including China, they also for the first time invited countries from East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand — Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Could you explain why you think they did that now and what this implies for the long-term goals of NATO?
ANATOLLIEVEN: There are two reasons. I mean, one is that, obviously, as China becomes more and more powerful, economically stronger and stronger, it does raise understandable anxieties in the democratic countries of the West. That, however, is not the same as a security threat to Europe.
And the other — and as far as values are concerned, well, you know, I was listening to the program. I have to say it really seems to me that the obvious threats to Western liberal democracy are internal. You know, they are about all the things that we know about: socioeconomic inequality, demographic change driving internal extremism and cultural anxieties. And China actually has nothing to do with any of this. You know, to some degree, it is actually a distraction. And remember, I mean, you know, the whole point of NATO in the end is to defend Western liberal democracy. Now, by looking militarily at China, even to a degree by — not by supporting Ukraine, you understand — that’s absolutely right — but by building up this idea of Russia as a massive threat to the West, is NATO really concentrating on the most important dangers to liberal democracy, I wonder.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And as far as — to turn now to what the situation in Ukraine is, your recent piece for The Nation is headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.” If you could elaborate the argument that you make there, and, in particular, the point that you make regarding the status of the Donbas and Crimea and why that must, in any peace settlement, be left for future negotiations?
ANATOLLIEVEN: Well, the thing is that the first Russian demand, a treaty of neutrality, has actually, in principle, been accepted by President Zelensky. You know, it’s there on the Ukrainian presidential website. The point being, as Zelensky has said, that before the Russian invasion, he went to NATO countries and asked for a guarantee of NATO membership within a reasonable space of time, five years, and they all said, “No, no, no, sorry, you’re not going to get in.” So, you know, fairly enough, Zelensky said, “OK, then, why not a treaty of neutrality?”
Now, of course, the Ukrainians have asked for some very, very firm guarantees of Ukrainian security as part of a treaty of neutrality. Those, however, I think we won’t go into detail about now, but they are negotiable. You know, we can think of some good ways of addressing that.
The territorial issues are much more complicated, because there are basically incompatible positions there: the Ukrainian insistance on full sovereignty over all Ukrainian territory as it existed when Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the Russian claim of sovereignty over Crimea and recognition of independence of the Donbas separatist republics. And then there is the issue — you know, I’m sorry, it gets horribly complicated, but these issues always are. There’s the point that Russia has recognized the independence of the Donbas republics on the whole administrative territory of the Donbas but actually still has not occupied that whole territory. You know, half of it is still in Ukrainian hands. So it’s going to be very hard to negotiate.
However, the Ukrainians have said that if Russia will withdraw from all the new territory it has occupied since the invasion began, Ukraine is prepared to essentially shelve the previous territorial issues for future negotiation — at least that’s what Ukraine said previously, but there have been wildly different statements coming out of the Ukrainian government. It’s clear that there are — well, firstly, that there are deep divisions within the Ukrainian government and elites. And secondly, of course, once again, I mean, very, very understandably, as the war has progressed, as the destruction by Russia has got worse and worse, as there are these revelations of Russian atrocities, so, naturally, the Ukrainians have been more — become more and more embittered, and more and more of them have decided that they have to fight through to total victory.
But I think, you know, we also have to recognize that viewed from outside — I mean, I’ve said that I think it’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia. So, in the end, one way or the other, we’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.
AMYGOODMAN: So, Anatol, if you can comment on the G7 reaching an agreement around a price cap on Russian oil exports, and the backfiring of the sanctions? The New York Timeswrites, “Despite the sanctions, Russia’s revenues from oil sales have been on the rise, a function of soaring fuel prices, while consumers around the world have faced mounting pain at the gasoline pump.”
ANATOLLIEVEN: Well, two things about that. The first is that, you know, Western governments should have thought about this before the war, this threat, a very, very obvious one, and done much more to try to avert the war by seeking, well, for example, the treaty of neutrality which Ukraine has now offered, because, I mean, you know, obviously — I mean, not just oil and gas, but food, as well. It was perfectly obvious that massive sanctions against Russia would have this effect on global energy and food prices. So, you know, that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that, look, we don’t know, but there are already obvious splits behind the scenes between — both between European governments but also between some European governments and America, on the approach to the war in Ukraine and a peace settlement. And, I mean, European officials I’ve talked to in private have said that, you know, going into the autumn, if Germany is facing a winter of a widespread contraction of German industry as a result of lack of energy, if European governments are going into a winter with energy shortages, with radically higher energy prices, if there are by then either serious threats of global recession or if we’re already in a global recession, then, of course, I think you are likely to see much more pressure for a — some attempt at a compromise peace, or at least an agreed ceasefire in Ukraine. And what I tried to do in my essay for The Nation was to suggest to Western policymakers some of the contours — in my view, the only viable contours — of what such a peace settlement could look like.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And do you think, Anatol, finally, that the signs at the moment, I mean, the fact in this — the fact of NATO expansion, the presence now of U.S. troops — increasing presence of U.S. troops in Europe, in symbolic terms the ascension of Finland and Sweden, and NATO saying yesterday — Jens Stoltenberg saying that allies are prepared for the long haul on Ukraine, this, together with the fact that as far as, if one takes Russia’s word for it, if this was all about NATO, things are going not quite as they had planned, what indication is there, given both these things, that anyone, either party, would be interested in beginning negotiations anytime in the near future?
ANATOLLIEVEN: Well, I mean, you’re absolutely right, of course. And look, I mean, I’m not naive about the chances. But I think, you know, when you said that things have not exactly gone to plan as far as Russia is concerned, that is quite an understatement. You know, this has been a disaster for Russia, of course. And it’s been a disaster militarily. I mean, remember that Russia has actually failed to achieve almost all its key military objectives in Ukraine. It’s failed. It’s been fought to a standstill. And to go on and on like this is going to cost enormous Russian casualties and not necessarily gain any more significant ground. So, that, in principle, creates an incentive to seek an agreement. And, of course, the Ukrainians are also suffering terribly.
And I think it’s also worth remembering that Ukraine now does have a genuine chance, for the first time, of future membership of the European Union. And that is — I mean, that is really the mark of Ukraine joining the West, much more than NATO, you know, if Ukraine can join the European Union. But it can’t do so as long as it’s in this war with the Ukrainian economy being shot to pieces by the Russians. So there is also, of course, an incentive for the Ukrainian side to try to reach an agreement. But, look, I’m not saying that this is easy.
As far as Stoltenberg is concerned, I mean, look, remember, Stoltenberg represents the NATO bureaucracy. He doesn’t head a government. He’s not elected. He doesn’t have to care about energy prices, unemployment, inflation, any of these things. He actually doesn’t even have to care about starvation in Africa or the Middle East as a result of food shortages because of the war. So, you know, the people who are ultimately going to make the decisions are the elected politicians, who do have to care about these things.
AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you, Anatol Lieven, for joining us, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.”
Coming up, we look at how the far-right Supreme Court has radically reshaped the United States. We’ll speak with the ACLU’s David Cole. Stay with us.
Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that’s probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies.
Pompeo is serving as a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove.
A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.
Pompeo’s speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world’s fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to “prostrate itself to radicals.”
Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a “genocide” in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names “Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan” as “the three lighthouses for liberty” which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three “lighthouses” just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.
But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.
“By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East,” Pompeo says.
“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” he later adds. “To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”
That’s all the major international news stories of today are ultimately about, right there. Underlying all the smaller news stories about conflicts with nations like Russia, China and Iran, there’s one continuous story about the US power alliance trying to secure planetary domination by relentlessly working to subvert any nation which refuses to align with it, and about the nations who oppose that campaign working against it with steadily increasing intimacy.
This is all the Russia hysteria from 2016 onward has been about. This is all the phony, hypocritical hand-wringing about Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been about. This is all the staged histrionics about human rights in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba have been about. It’s all been about manufacturing international consent for an increasingly dangerous campaign to secure unipolar global hegemony at any cost.
It’s worth calling this to mind, as NATO for the first time designates China a threat due to its alignment with Russia and as NATO’s secretary-general admits that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia since 2014. It is worth calling to mind the fact that the US has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any rival superpower to deny any serious challenge to its planetary domination. It is worth calling to mind that in 1997 the precursor to the US Space Force committed to working toward “full spectrum dominance,” meaning military control over land, sea, air, and space.
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US unipolar hegemony.
They are right that China challenges NATO interests: the NATO cartel's existential goal of enforcing a US global dictatorship, one that imposes neoliberalism on the planet, destroying any country that proposes a state-led, people-centered economic model https://t.co/y5HCWAGkiL
People like to talk about secret conspiracies by shadowy cabals to establish a one-world government, but what is by far the most tangible and imminent global domination agenda has been orchestrated right out in the open. The US government has long sought to unite the world under a single power structure, no matter how much violence and devastation it needs to inflict upon humanity and no matter how much world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship it needs to engage in to do so.
This is the US empire which corrupt psychopaths like Mike Pompeo support. A power structure which wages nonstop wars in order to keep the peace, which continually oppresses populations around the world in order to protect freedom, and which risks nuclear war with increasingly reckless aggression to in order save the world.
_________________
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Instances of sympathy are rarely excuses to throw out the rule book. In the case of the European Union, throwing out the rule book about admission has tended to be a feature of enlargement. Credentials of candidate states have been, when needed, boosted or cooked for the occasion. Others, whatever the progress, have been ignored. For a collective that really ought to tidy the stables before admitting more occupants, the enthusiastic glee with which Ukraine’s symbolic candidacy has greeted stayed true to form.
The Ukraine War has done away with the more troubling facts of European integration and its process. Everything is now being done to powder, paint and deodorise Ukraine as a true European power of democratic flavour facing despotic Oriental barbarism. Out of the debris, all opponents of that barbarism are tolerant, peace loving democrats singing hymns to the rule of law. This has the added effect of not examining the special nature of the society in question. Regarding Ukraine, this is striking.
In terms of economy and politics, it would be hard to see Ukraine as a credible candidate under official accession procedures. According to remarks made by Freedom House, itself a US-funded non-profit organisation of some notoriety, “corruption remains endemic, and initiatives to combat it are only partially implemented.” It also notes that attacks on journalists, civil society activists and members of minority groups have proven all too frequent.
These are some of the problems that have been cited to explain the lengthy waiting times for other states going through the EU accession process. The enlargement procedure is governed by a number of requirements. For instance, Chapter 23 covers the judiciary (independence, impartiality, accountability), the battle against corruption, fundamental rights (for instance, the right to a trial, a right to a fair trial, anti-discrimination), and the rights of EU citizens. Chapter 24 covers matters of justice, freedom and security, noting the requirements for efficient policing and cooperation across a range of areas.
Given such requirements, EU bureaucracy has been stifling and discouraging towards a number of candidate hopefuls. They, in turn, have resorted to a suite of demands, often framed along nationalist lines. The problem is most pronounced in the Western Balkans, where the candidates have been left lingering in a chilling waiting room. Brussels has done wonders in damaging its own reputation in this regard, blocking, for instance, accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia.
In Serbia, attitudes to joining the EU have cooled. In April, a poll conducted by Ipsos and published in the Serbian newspaper Blic, revealed that 44% of respondents were against membership, with 35% in favour. It was the first time in two decades that those against joining had topped the list. Playing to that mood, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has argued that the “European path” would be continued and pursued in dignified fashion. In the meantime, Serbia would keep its “independence in decision-making, at least until we become a member of the EU.”
No number of sweet, treacly assessments of Ukrainian society, even from the most messianic US funded organisations, have been able to get away from the specific problems facing Ukraine’s civil society advocates. But war has come, and glowing opportunities have presented themselves. In the European Council meeting held in Brussels on June 23-4, the decision was made to sign off on the European Commission’s recommendation to grant Ukraine and Moldova official candidate status.
Yet for all the foamy praise for the measure, the unified front is deceptive. Denmark and Portugal have made the point that, were it not for the war, Ukraine would barely warrant a spot in the accession queue to commence membership negotiations. A country like Moldova would be even further behind. Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa sees greater priority and value in keeping the EU house in firm agreement. “The best support that the European Union can give to Ukraine is to keep its unity.” His preference was to focus on building “a long-term platform to support the recovery of Ukraine” rather than dabbling in protracted “legal debates”. For Costa, it was imperative to avoid creating “false expectations that become bitter disappointment.”
Even French President Emmanuel Macron has given a range of different signals, admitting that the cases of Ukraine and Moldova were “very clearly […] linked to the context.” This was exceptional, he conceded, as enlargement was generally incompatible with the bloc’s mission of integration. His controversial preference has been for an alternative European political community that might even, come the time, include Russia.
In specialist and academic circles, the enlargement genie has also been attached to the coattails of war. Vedran Džihić of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, and Paul Schmidt, Secretary General of the Austrian Society for European Politics, see a chance to speed up the show. That project stalled with the accession of Croatia in 2013. The authors urge Brussels to move beyond “the technocratic rigidity that has come to characterise EU enlargement and neighbourhood policies.” They also encourage a “common geopolitical Europeanisation of the countries in the Western Balkans, together with Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia”.
Even more intriguing in the propping up of Ukraine’s membership credentials ahead of other states languishing in the queue is a misunderstanding of how the EU itself operates. The relentlessly questioning Giandomenico Majone regards the body as occupying a world where “the language of democratic politics is largely unintelligible”, seeing a closer parallel with ancient Sparta rather than Athens, “where the popular assembly voted yes or no to the proposals advanced by the Council of Elders but had no right to propose measures on its own account.”
In this world, policy arises less from an enfranchised populace than an oligarchy of cabinets, bureaucrats and diplomats. For all the talk about independent judiciaries, anti-corruption measures, and accountability, the EU lags, making the candidate status of countries such as Ukraine and Moldova less bizarre than might otherwise be.
The CIA and special operations forces from NATO members Britain, France, Canada, and Lithuania are physically in Ukraine, helping direct the proxy war on Russia, according to a report in The New York Times.
These Western forces are on the ground training and advising Ukrainian fighters, overseeing weapons shipments, and managing intelligence.
At least 20 countries are part of a US Army-led coalition, guiding Ukraine in its fight against Russian troops.
Some Ukrainian combatants are even using US flag patches on their equipment.
This is all according to a June 25 report in The New York Times, titled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say.”
The Times is a de facto organ of the US government. Although technically private, the paper closely follows the line of the CIA and Pentagon.
From the New York Times “The ruined industrial city in eastern Ukraine fell after months of Russian bombardment and weeks of urban combat. Like Mariupol, it became emblematic of the savagery of the war.”
Read similar articles and learn the content rarely follows the headline. Search Google and try to find images of a ruined and severely shelled Severodonetsk. Well, here is one. Take this headline from WION – World Is One News with global headquarters in New Delhi.
“High-resolution images collected by Maxar Technologies over a period of 24 hours on Monday show damaged buildings from artillery shelling in downtown Severodonetsk and around a hospital. From a hole in the roof, to charred buildings, the images showcase how the area has been laid waste by constant shelling.”
Note: Several online media published the exact same display of images and commentary.
Well, let’s see. Here is the first image.
Satellite image shows destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine, near Sievierodonetsk.
Oh, not Sievierodonetsk, but a village near Sievierodonetsk.
“Severodonetsk, an industrial hub, is key to Russia’s plan as its fall would open up the route to Kramatorsk, the main city of Donetsk. At least 70 per cent of Severodonetsk is reported to be under Russian control, though the Ukrainian forces are fighting back. Ukraine repelling Russian attacks. The regional governor, Serhiy Haidai said tough street battles were continuing with varying degrees of success. ‘The situation constantly changes, but the Ukrainians are repelling attacks,’ he said.”
Next image.
A 40-meter crater can be seen next to destroyed buildings.
Evidently, this is not the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk.
“Sievierodonetsk important for Putin. Russia seeks victory in Sievierodonetsk, which would give it full control of Luhansk province. When Vladimir Putin began his invasion on 24 February, he pledged to “liberate” the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk where were in separatist hands.”
Next image.
This image shows a field peppered with craters caused by artillery, northwest of Slovyansk
“Russian forces have been focused for weeks on seizing Sievierodonetsk, which was home to some 106,000 people before Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, but the Luhansk region’s governor said Ukrainian forces would not surrender the city.:
Next image.
This image shows active artillery shelling in the town of Bogorodichne, Ukraine, northwest of Slovyansk
Where are photos of Sievierodonetsk?
“Widespread destruction (of Sievierodonetsk?)”
O.K.
This satellite image shows damaged buildings around a hospital in Sievierodonetsk, Ukraine
Wait a second!
(1) Where is the widespread destruction? I only see one possible bomb hit. Other dark spots are shadows.
(2) Is that really a hospital? The Red Cross is on top of vegetation. Has it been photoshopped? Note there is no parking lot nor cars parked by the “hospital.” Don’t people work there or visit?
CNN published the same image under the headline, “At least 2 hospitals hit by military strikes in Severodonetsk and Rubizhne, new satellite images show.” Does the image show a bombed hospital?
There must be some images of this heavily shelled Severodonetsk. Googled “heavily shelled Severodonetsk.”
Came up with the same previous image provided by Maxar Technologies, which showed destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine near Severodonetsk. All other images were those of smoke rising over Severodonetsk. None of the images showed damage to the city.
Smoke rises during shelling of the city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine on May 21
The YouTube video showed only some noise and smoke, no extensive damages
Washington Post
“Ukrainian soldiers in Severodonetsk, the eastern city under continuous Russian bombardment, are holding their positions despite relentless shelling, and troops are “doing their utmost to defend the city,” its mayor, Oleksandr Stryuk, said Tuesday. The satellite images show fields full of artillery craters, city blocks reduced to rubble and a 130-foot bomb scar.
The Ukrainian government has said that about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed.”
Press on the link The satellite images show and it will return to the articles – no images, that’s right, no images, and no “about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed. ”
Conclusion
Western media, which tends to always degrade its adversaries, as long as they continue to be adversaries — Russia, China, Iran. Gaddafi Libya and not the post-Gaddafi Libya — report a one-sided view of the war. Other media, attempting to capture audience, sensationalize catastrophes. Obtaining credible reports of the war in Ukraine requires shuffling through several accounts and piecing them together to make a logical analysis. Undoubtedly, Severodonetsk suffered from shelling and had some serious, but not extensive damage. The Russians encircled the city, destroyed the bridges, and then entered the city, which the Ukraine army was not equipped to defend. After two weeks of retreating within the city, the remnants of the Ukrainian army left.
Yesterday I mentioned the burning shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, of which the Ukrainian president Zelensky falsely claimed that thousand people had been inside. I asked: “Satellite pictures show that the shopping center is right next to the large Kredmash machine plant. Was that the real target of the attack with the shopping center being an unintended casualty?”
It has now been confirmed that the answer to my question is ‘yes’.
Renowned progressive intellectual Noam Chomsky, author of over a 100 books, was recently interviewed by AcTVism. The entire interview is interesting, but the focus here is on the first 20 minutes where the situation in Ukraine is discussed.
Chomsky lays out the US directive to NATO in the proxy war: “The war must continue until Russia is severely harmed.”
The professor scoffs at Russian military might. He says that western European countries “are gloating over the fact that the Russia military has demonstrated to be a paper tiger, couldn’t even conquer a couple of cities a couple of kilometers from the border defended mostly by a citizens army, so all the talk about Russian military power was exposed as empty…”
I grant that Chomsky is indeed a polymath, but is he an expert on military operations? Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic, on the other hand, are Americans steeped in militarism. Berletic is a former US marine and Ritter is a former intelligence officer for the US marines. Both of them explain the Russian strategy in shaping the battlefield. The reason for this is to minimize Russian casualties and Ukrainian civilian casualties. This is unlike American Shock and Awe warfare where “collateral damage” (as killing of civilians by US military is trivialized) is accepted to attain US military objectives. Moreover, since Donbass was the industrial heartland of Ukraine, as well as part of the wheat belt, it is in Russia’s interest to protect the infrastructure and agriculture, as well as protecting the, largely Russian speaking, people of Donbass. However, the perceived slowness of implementing the Russian strategy — surrounding enemy fighters in siege warfare and compelling their surrender — seems to make Russia a paper tiger in Chomsky’s estimation.
If Russia is a paper tiger, then what does that make Ukraine? Ukraine was trained by NATO, armed by NATO, and fed intelligence by NATO, as well as outnumbering Russian fighters while fighting on home turf?
Yet Russia has destroyed most of the Ukrainian fighters (including Ukrainian Nazi fighters), obliterated most of their weaponry, including resupplies by NATO, and has liberated Donbass and conquered other parts of Ukraine (a country on the verge of potentially becoming landlocked if it persists in fighting a losing battle).
Chomsky characterizes western countries as “free democratic societies.” [sic] He follows this by stating, “There is no conceivable possibility that Russia will attack anyone [else]. They could barely handle this [fight with Ukraine]. They had to back off without NATO involvement.”
The fighting was personalized by Chomsky as Putin’s “criminal aggression” and that Putin acted “very stupidly” because he “drove Europe into Washington’s pocket”: “the greatest gift he could give the United States.” Chomsky would heap more ad hominem at Putin’s “utter imbecility.”
“The United States is utterly delighted,” states Chomsky. The military-industrial complex is “euphoric.” “Fossil fuel companies are delighted… It’s almost unbelievable the stupidity.”
Chomsky acknowledges that Ukraine cannot defeat the paper tiger, Russia, and supposedly Russian military actions have united the western world against Russia, as if the western world were not already arrayed against Russia. Yes, Germany backed out of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for delivery of gas to the German market. But who was hurt more by this?
Fossil fuel prices have soared and Russia is the beneficiary. Despite sanctions, the Russian ruble is strong. While the western Europeans have remained fidel to their American masters, Africa, South America, and Asia have ignored the sanctions. China, Pakistan, India, among others, have stepped in to import Russian oil and gas.
While Chomsky points out that the US military-industrial complex and Big Oil are overjoyed by the Russia-Ukraine warring, unmentioned is that average American citizens (and their European counterparts) are not feeling particularly gleeful at spiking gas costs and burgeoning inflation.
Chomsky keeps his focus on the invasion. “There is no way to justify the invasion. None!” Talk of justification is “totally nonsense,” says Chomsky. He admits that there was “provocation” by the US for ignoring Russian security concerns. “But provocation does not yield justification,” he asserts. “There is nothing that can justify criminal aggression.”
Why does Chomsky not mention the 8 years that Ukraine had been aggressing Donbass, criminally, where a reported 14,000 Donbass citizens were killed? Russia refers to a genocide perpetrated by Ukraine in Donbass. Russia justified its “special military operation” (what Chomsky calls a criminal aggression) by recognizing the sovereignty of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics and entering into a defensive pact (what NATO is supposed to be about).
War is anathema, but when diplomacy fails and you are faced with a violent, belligerent hegemon, then sometimes war becomes a necessity. When an animal is backed into a corner, it will come out fighting for its life. The writing was on the wall when the US, a serial violator of international agreements, broke its promise to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch further eastward and then expanded to the Ukrainian border, a red line for Russia. Russia was being backed into a corner. Speaking to the initiator of the war in Ukraine, a question arises: is the animal backed into a corner by a predator an aggressor for realizing that fighting was the only option?
But no lives needed to have been lost. No territory needed to have been lost (aside from Crimea which had held a referendum in which the population overwhelmingly voted to join Russia; it is a United Nations recognized right of a people to self-determination). And to think that all of this could have been averted if Ukraine had upheld the Minsk agreements that they signed granting autonomy to Donbass, nixed seeking NATO membership, and declared themselves neutral. In other words, honor a contract and use money allotted to militarism for other ends (say, for example, education, employment, and social programs). Sounded like a no-brainer from the get-go, and this has been magnified since the special military operation. But it does not seem to be sinking in to the Russophobia-addled brains of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his coterie.
All this is missing from Chomsky’s analysis. The Nazified Ukrainian government somehow escapes criticism. The US does not escape criticism, but this is mild compared to the name calling and criticism of Russia. It may not be surprising considering that Chomsky has been criticized for a biased and inaccurate version of Soviet/Russian history.
Renfrey Clarke asks who really set the stage for the war, and finds the answer in the aggressive military pressure exerted in the region by the United States and NATO.
