Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images
On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.
On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.
It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.
In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.
How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?
The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?
And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.
The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.
Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.
But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.
That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.
U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.
On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from TheNew York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:
“Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”
The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”
A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.
As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.
The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.
If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.
Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.
But hold on! As it happens, Ukraine isn’t the only place on the planet where a nuclear conflagration could erupt in the near future. Sad to say, around the island of Taiwan — where U.S. and Chinese forces are engaging in ever more provocative military maneuvers — there is also an increasing risk that such moves by both sides could lead to nuclear escalation.
While neither American nor Chinese officials have explicitly threatened to use such weaponry, both sides have highlighted possible extreme outcomes there. When Joe Biden last spoke with Xi Jinping by telephone on July 29th, the Chinese president warned him against allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit the island (which she nonetheless did, four days later) or offering any further encouragement to “Taiwan independence forces” there. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” he assured the American president, an ambiguous warning to be sure, but one that nevertheless left open the possible use of nuclear weapons.
As if to underscore that point, on September 4th, the day after Pelosi met with senior Taiwanese officials in Taipei, China fired 11 Dongfeng-15 (DF-15) ballistic missiles into the waters around that island. Many Western observers believe that the barrage was meant as a demonstration of Beijing’s ability to attack any U.S. naval vessels that might come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion of the island. And the DF-15, with a range of 600 miles, is believed capable of delivering not only a conventional payload, but also a nuclear one.
In the days that followed, China also sent nuclear-capable H-6 heavy bombers across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a previously respected informal boundary between China and that island. Worse yet, state-owned media displayed images of Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) hypersonic ballistic missiles, also believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons, being moved into positions off Taiwan.
Washington has not overtly deployed nuclear-capable weaponry in such a brazen fashion near Chinese territory, but it certainly has sent aircraft carriers and guided-missile warships into the area, signaling its ability to launch attacks on the mainland should a war break out. While Pelosi was in Taiwan, for example, the Navy deployed the carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its flotilla of escort vessels in nearby waters. Military officials in both countries are all too aware that should such ships ever attack Chinese territory, those DF-15s and DF-17s would be let loose against them — and, if armed with nuclear warheads, would likely provoke a U.S. nuclear response.
The implicit message on both sides: a nuclear war might be possible. And although — unlike with Putin’s comments — the American media hasn’t highlighted the way Taiwan might trigger such a conflagration, the potential is all too ominously there.
“One China” and “Strategic Ambiguity”
In reality, there’s nothing new about the risk of nuclear war over Taiwan. In both the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954-1955 and 1958, the United States threatened to attack a then-nonnuclear China with such weaponry if it didn’t stop shelling the Taiwanese-controlled islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu), located off that country’s coast. At the time, Washington had no formal relations with the communist regime on the mainland and recognized the Republic of China (ROC) — as Taiwan calls itself — as the government of all China. In the end, however, U.S. leaders found it advantageous to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in place of the ROC and the risk of a nuclear conflict declined precipitously — until recently.
Credit the new, increasingly perilous situation to Washington’s changing views of Taiwan’s strategic value to America’s dominant position in the Pacific as it faces the challenge of China’s emergence as a great power. When the U.S. officially recognized the PRC in 1978, it severed its formal diplomatic and military relationship with the ROC, while “acknowledg[ing] the Chinese position that there is but one China and [that] Taiwan is part of China.” That stance — what came to be known as the “One China” policy — has, in fact, underwritten peaceful relations between the two countries (and Taiwan’s autonomy) ever since, by allowing Chinese leaders to believe that the island would, in time, join the mainland.
Taiwan’s safety and autonomy has also been preserved over the years by another key feature of U.S. policy, known as “strategic ambiguity.” It originated with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, a measure passed in the wake of the U.S. decision to recognize the PRC as the legal government of all China. Under the act, still in effect, the U.S. is empowered to supply Taiwan with “defensive” arms, while maintaining only semi-official ties with its leadership. It also says that Washington would view any Chinese attempt to alter Taiwan’s status through violent means as a matter “of grave concern,” but without explicitly stating that the U.S. will come to Taiwan’s aid if that were to occur. Such official ambiguity helped keep the peace, in part by offering Taiwan’s leadership no guarantee that Washington would back them if they declared independence and China invaded, while giving the leaders of the People’s Republic no assurance that Washington would remain on the sidelines if they did.
Since 1980, both Democratic and Republican administrations have relied on such strategic ambiguity and the One China policy to guide their peaceful relations with the PRC. Over the years, there have been periods of spiking tensions between Washington and Beijing, with Taiwan’s status a persistent irritant, but never a fundamental breach in relations. And that — consider the irony, if you will — has allowed Taiwan to develop into a modern, prosperous quasi-state, while escaping involvement in a major-power confrontation (in part because it just didn’t figure prominently enough in U.S. strategic thinking).
From 1980 to 2001, America’s top foreign-policy officials were largely focused on defeating the Soviet Union, dealing with the end of the Cold War, and expanding global trade opportunities. Then, from September 11, 2001, to 2018, their attention was diverted to the Global War on Terror. In the early years of the Trump administration, however, senior military officials began switching their focus from the War on Terror to what they termed “great-power competition,” arguing that facing off against “near-peer” adversaries, namely China and Russia, should be the dominant theme in military planning. And only then did Taiwan acquire a different significance.
The Pentagon’s new strategic outlook was first spelled out in the National Defense Strategy of February 2018 in this way: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia. (And yes, the emphasis was in the original.) China, in particular, was identified as a vital threat to Washington’s continued global dominance. “As China continues its economic and military ascendance,” the document asserted, “it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”
An ominous “new Cold War” era had begun.
Taiwan’s Strategic Significance Rises
To prevent China from achieving that most feared of all results, “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony,” Pentagon leaders devised a multipronged strategy, combining an enhanced U.S. military presence in the region with beefed-up, ever more militarized ties with America’s allies there. As that 2018 National Defense Strategy put it, “We will strengthen our alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains.” Initially, that “networked security architecture” was only to involve long-term allies like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Soon enough, however, Taiwan came to be viewed as a crucial part of such an architecture.
To grasp what this meant, imagine a map of the Western Pacific. In seeking to “contain” China, Washington was relying on a chain of island and peninsular allies stretching from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and Australia. Japan’s southernmost islands, including Okinawa — the site of major American military bases (and a vigorous local anti-base movement) — do reach all the way into the Philippine Sea. Still, there remains a wide gap between them and Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island. Smack in the middle of that gap lies… yep, you guessed it, Taiwan.
In the view of the top American military and foreign policy officials, for the United States to successfully prevent China from becoming a major regional power, it would have to bottle up that country’s naval forces within what they began calling “the first island chain” — the string of nations stretching from Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia. For China to thrive, as they saw it, that nation’s navy would have to be able to send its ships past that line of islands and reach deep into the Pacific. You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that solidifying U.S. defenses along that very chain became a top Pentagon priority — and, in that context, Taiwan has, ominously enough, come to be viewed as a crucial piece in the strategic puzzle.
Last December, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner summed up the Pentagon’s new way of thinking about the island’s geopolitical role when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last December. “Taiwan,” he said, “is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”
This new perception of Taiwan’s “critical” significance has led senior policymakers in Washington to reconsider the basics, including their commitment to a One China policy and to strategic ambiguity. While still claiming that One China remains White House policy, President Biden has repeatedly insisted all too unambiguously that the U.S. has an obligation to defend Taiwan if attacked. When asked recently on Sixty Minutes whether “U.S. forces…would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” Biden said, without hesitation, “Yes.” The administration has also upgraded its diplomatic ties with the island and promised it billions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers and other forms of military assistance. In essence, such moves constitute a de facto abandonment of “One China” and its replacement with a “one China, one Taiwan” policy.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities have reacted to such comments and the moves accompanying them with increasing apprehension and anger. As seen from Beijing, they represent the full-scale repudiation of multiple statements acknowledging Taiwan’s indivisible ties to the mainland, as well as a potential military threat of the first order should that island become a formal U.S. ally. For President Xi and his associates, this is simply intolerable.
“The repeated attempts by the Taiwan authorities to look for U.S. support for their independence agenda as well as the intention of some Americans to use Taiwan to contain China” are deeply troubling, President Xi told Biden during their telephone call in November 2021. “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burned.”
Since then, Chinese officials have steadily escalated their rhetoric, threatening war in ever more explicit terms. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence,” Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., typically told NPR in January 2022, “it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in military conflict.”
To demonstrate its seriousness, China has begun conducting regular air and naval exercises in the air- and sea-space surrounding Taiwan. Such maneuvers usually involve the deployment of five or six warships and a dozen or more warplanes, as well as ever greater displays of firepower, clearly with the intention of intimidating the Taiwanese leadership. On August 5th, for example, the Chinese deployed 13 warships and 68 warplanes in areas around Taiwan and two days later, 14 ships and 66 planes.
Each time, the Taiwanese scramble their own aircraft and deploy coastal defense vessels in response. Accordingly, as China’s maneuvers grow in size and frequency, the risk of an accidental or unintended clash becomes ever more likely. The increasingly frequent deployment of U.S. warships to nearby waters only adds to this explosive mix. Every time an American naval vessel is sent through the Taiwan Strait — something that occurs almost once a month now — China scrambles its own air and sea defenses, producing a comparable risk of unintended violence.
This was true, for example, when the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through that strait on August 28th. According to Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, China’s military “conducted security tracking and monitoring of the U.S. warships’ passage during their whole course and had all movements of the U.S. warships under control.”
No Barriers to Escalation?
If it weren’t for the seemingly never-ending war in Ukraine, the dangers of all of this might be far more apparent and deemed far more newsworthy. Unfortunately, at this point, there are no indications that either Beijing or Washington is prepared to scale back its provocative military maneuvers around Taiwan. That means an accidental or unintended clash could occur at any time, possibly triggering a full-scale conflict.
Imagine, then, what a decision by Taiwan to declare full independence or by the Biden administration to abandon the One China policy could mean. China would undoubtedly respond aggressively, perhaps with a naval blockade of the island or even a full-scale invasion. Given the increasingly evident lack of interest among the key parties in compromise, a violent outcome appears ever more likely.
However such a conflict erupts, it may prove difficult to contain the fighting at a “conventional” level. After all, both sides are wary of another war of attrition like the one unfolding in Ukraine and have instead shaped their military forces for rapid, firepower-intensive combat aimed at securing a decisive victory quickly. For Beijing, this could mean firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at U.S. ships and air bases in the region with the aim of eliminating any American capacity to attack its territory. For Washington, it might mean launching missiles at China’s key ports, air bases, radar stations, and command centers. In either case, the results could prove catastrophic. For the U.S., the loss of its carriers and other warships; for China, the loss of its very capacity to make war. Would leaders of the losing side accept such a situation without resorting to nuclear weapons? No one can say for sure, but the temptation to escalate would undoubtedly be great.
Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no U.S.-China negotiations under way to resolve the Taiwan question, to prevent unintended clashes in the Taiwan Strait, or to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. In fact, China quite publicly cut off all discussion of bilateral issues, ranging from military affairs to climate change, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. So, it’s essential, despite the present focus on escalation risks in Ukraine, to recognize that avoiding a war over Taiwan is no less important — especially given the danger that such a conflict could prove of even greater destructiveness. That’s why it’s so critical that Washington and Beijing put aside their differences long enough to initiate talks focused on preventing such a catastrophe.
The Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pledged late Monday to block all future U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia as backlash over OPEC’s decision to cut oil production and push up gas prices continues to grow on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has veto power over foreign arms sales, said in a statement that OPEC’s plan to slash production by two million barrels a day in a bid to prop up oil prices amounts to a “decision to help underwrite Putin’s war.” Russia, an OPEC ally, stands to benefit from higher oil prices without having to reduce its own production.
“The United States must immediately freeze all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including any arms sales and security cooperation beyond what is absolutely necessary to defend U.S. personnel and interests,” Menendez said Monday. “As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough.”
With his statement, Menendez — a war hawk — joined progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in demanding an end to U.S. military aid to the Saudis, the largest buyer of American weaponry.
On Sunday, Khanna and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) announced legislation that would “immediately halt all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.” Last week, three House Democrats introduced a bill that would require the removal of U.S. troops and missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a leading member of the OPEC cartel.
Over the past several years, the U.S. has approved tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons sales to the Saudis as they’ve waged a catastrophic war on Yemen, sparking a massive humanitarian crisis. The U.S. has also cooperated with the Saudis militarily in other ways, including by refueling the oil kingdom’s warplanes, supplying fighter jet parts, and teaming up with the country’s murderous leadership to build high-tech bomb parts.
Recent congressional efforts to block arms sales to the Saudis — including major deals approved by the Biden administration — have fallen short, but the OPEC decision could mark a key turning point as top Democratic lawmakers demand a complete reevaluation of U.S.-Saudi relations.
Just over a year ago, Menendez notably opposed a Senate resolution that aimed to block a $650 million sale of missiles to the Saudis. The bipartisan resolution ultimately failed to clear the upper chamber.
In a statement last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat and a supporter of previous attempts to block arms sales to the Saudis — declared that “it’s time for our foreign policy to imagine a world without this alliance with these royal backstabbers.”
“From unanswered questions about 9/11, the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the exporting of extremism, to dubious jailing of peaceful dissidents and conspiring with Vladimir Putin to punish the U.S. with higher oil prices, the Saudi royal family has never been a trustworthy ally of our nation,” Durbin said.
Demonstrators call for greater support from west and help communicating with outside world
The EU and the US are considering further sanctions against Iran over the attempt to suppress demonstrations and strikes in universities over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in a police detention centre.
Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, condemned Iran’s disproportionate use of force and said all options would be on the table at the next meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers. The main options are helping to prevent the internet being shut by Iran, and further economic sanctions.
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Bruce Gagnon for his most current thoughts.
Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and was a co-founder of the Global Network when it was created in 1992. He was an early member of the Anti-Defense Lobby in the 1970s challenging the U.S. space program. Between 1983–1998, he was the State Coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice and has worked on space issues for 31 years. Bruce has addressed audiences in England, Germany, Mexico, Canada, France, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Japan, Australia, Scotland, Wales, Greece, India, Brazil, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech Republic, South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Nepal and throughout the U.S., including numerous college campuses. Bruce is a Vietnam-era veteran and began his organizing career by working for the United Farm Workers Union in Florida organizing fruit pickers. He is currently an active member of Veterans for Peace.
We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below of are exactly as he provided.
Here is what Bruce had to say.
John Rachel: We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.
Bruce Gagnon: The banksters in London and Wall Street are the essential movers and shakers of US-UK-NATO foreign policy. The CIA is their primary arm of control. Add to them the burgeoning global military industrial complex and the political ‘mis-leaders’ they generously contribute to. The corporate controlled mainstream media are also accessories to the present day crimes. Together they add up to a formidable crew of what I call ‘pirates’ who are stealing the national treasures throughout the western capitalist world and using them to supress and colonize others across the Global South and here at home.
JR: We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. The U.S. apparently cannot be at peace. “Threats” against the homeland are allegedly increasing in number and severity. The trajectory of our relations with the rest of the world appears to be more confrontations, more enemies, more crises, more wars. Is the world really that full of aggressors, bad actors, ruthless opponents? Or is there something in our own policies and attitudes toward other countries which put us at odds with them, thus making war inevitable and peace impossible?
BG: During the reign of George W. Bush in Washington, at the time of the US ‘shock and awe’ attack in Iraq, I was watching C-SPAN one evening. They introduced then Naval War College instructor Thomas Barnett (author of a book called The Pentagon’s New Map and they announced that in the audience were hundreds of top-level Pentagon officers and CIA bigwigs. During his talk Barnett told the assembled that due to globalization of the world economy every nation would have a specific role to fill. In the US he said we won’t make ‘consumer products’ anymore because it was cheaper to send those jobs overseas. Our role in the US, Barnett said, would be ‘security export’. Thus it should be no surprise that the #1 industrial export product of the US today is weapons. When weapons are your #1 industrial export product, what is your ‘global marketing strategy’ for that product line?
Barnett (introduced as Rumsfeld’s ‘strategy guy’) also told the leading brass that the Pentagon would be endlessly fighting to take control of the ‘non-integrating gap’ around the globe – those parts of the world that were not submitting to the authority of corporate globalization. He instructed the audience to go and teach these ‘new concepts’ to those under their authority if they hoped to get promoted within the system in the years ahead.
For more than a year after this Barnett presentation I witnessed him being squired around Washington speaking to Republican and Democrat audiences on C-SPAN. It was evident to me that his ‘new doctrine’ was a bi-partisan plan. Since that time it has become quite clear that this is true as we now see the Democrats leading the proxy war on Russia – using Ukraine as the hammer in this dangerous and provocative attempt to force regime change in Moscow. Pelosi’s recent ill-fated trip to Taiwan also indicates the plan to force regime change in Beijing.
Imagine that Washington and its NATO allies, who limped out of Afghanistan after 20 years of brutal occupation there, are now planning for war with Russia and China. The absurdity is beyond imagination. It reveals much about their psychopathology.
As long as this reality persists then we will move from one war to another. Arundhati Roy says, “Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons”. She is right on the money….
The bad actors are largely inside of the western capitalist nations whose whole priority is global domination and profit – a continuation of hundreds of years of US-European colonialism. The neocon-led bi-partisan Washington elite have no conscience.
JR: Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?
BG: When they talk about ‘national interests’ they are actually talking about the interests of the banksters. When they talk about ‘freedom’ they are talking about their freedom to steal the national wealth from nations with resources and the people around the world. Washington claims that Russia wants to re-create the former Soviet Union and take control of Europe. In 2022 Russia is spending $66 billion on their military. It is a defensive military to protect their vast border regions. The US this year is spending $800 billion plus. When you add up the hidden military spending in the other pots of gold – like the nuclear weapons spending inside the Department of Energy budget – the US total is around $1.2 trillion this year. They are robbing us blind and we keep handing over our hard-earned tax dollars. Why?
JR: It’s evident that you, and the many individuals who follow you and support your work, believe that America’s direction in both the diplomatic sphere and in the current conflict zones represents exercise of government power gone awry. Can you paint for us in broad strokes the specific changes in our national priorities and policies you view as necessary for the U.S. to peacefully coexist with other nations, at the same time keeping us safe from malicious attacks on our security and rightful place in the world community?
BG: Reject the neo-con arrogance, hypocrisy, ignorance, and unnatural sense of entitlement. You’d think they’d get embarrassed. Dripping with deceit, they never stop lying to the people.
(CIA controls the keys to this run-away freight train. Democracy was drowned when the CIA assassinated JFK. Every president since then is ‘selected’ by the ruling oligarchs.)
Washington has destroyed any last thin-threads of international respect it had following its recent pirate escapades, aimed at Russia and China.
It’s time to shut these fools (and their ‘international’ lap dogs) down…. before it’s too late.
We need to convert the military industrial complex (the war machine) to build public mass transit systems, tidal power systems, solar, wind power and the like – all of which would create more jobs than weapons manufacturing does.
We need to ban corporate funding of elections. We need to open up a multi-party system so that more voices can be heard by the voters.
We need to end the massive poverty that exists (which will be worsening in the near future) by taxing the rich and corporations. Stop the massive corporate subsides – welfare for the rich.
We need to close down the more than 800 US military bases around the world and cut the Pentagon budget by at least 80%. We only need a defensive military that protects our borders.
Do all these things and we might have a chance if we don’t first perish from a red-hot nuclear war or climate crisis.
We don’t have time to fool around. Folks need to get off their arses and speak out NOW.
JR: The general public, especially when it’s aware of the self-sabotaging results of our current foreign policies and military posturing, clearly wants less war and militarism, preferring more peaceful alternatives on the world stage and greater concentration on solving the problems at home. As peace activists, we are thus more in line with the majority of citizens on issues of war and peace, than those currently in power.
What happens if we determine that those shaping current U.S. policy don’t care what the citizenry thinks, are simply not listening to us? What if we conclude that our Congress, for example, is completely deaf to the voice of the people? What do we do? What are our options then? What are our next concrete steps as political activists in working toward a peaceful future?
BG: During WW II Italy’s leader Benito Mussolini defined ‘fascism’ as the wedding of corporations and government. That is what we have in Washington and in most of the EU nations today. Your question is right on – those in power don’t give a damn what the public thinks. Mr. Big (as I call them) wishes to return us to feudalism – neo-feudalism. They want to control everything and they don’t mind killing as many of us as necessary to accomplish their evil designs. Sadly far too many people, including political activists, dare to talk about this reality. They fear what others might think of them. Too many in the public just want to go along to get along. My mother used to tell me all the time that, ‘You can’t beat city hall’. In other words resign yourself to your coming fate. I reject that notion.
So our first step out of this quagmire is to recognize and acknowledge the writing on the wall. We are in a fix, we are in big trouble and we’d better wise up before it is too late. The neo-con ruling class wants to thin the global population and they intend to use every available means to do so – such as war$, starvation, lack of access to good health care, bio-logical weapons and the like.
We’ve all got to ask ourselves what is the #1 job of a human being on earth today? Make money, have a fancy house, car or job? No, I’d say our job as humans is to protect the planet and the future generations. Nothing could be more important than that.
We must all work as hard and consistently as possible to shut down our corrupt government. When our government no longer represents ‘We the people’ then we have an obligation to revolt. Why are people so compliant? Don’t they care about their children and grand-kids’ future? Do they have a right to just give up? I don’t think so.
We also must reach across political barriers and seek common ground with those who have differing views. One well-tested strategy used by the oligarchs is divide-and-conquer. Those in control want the people to be at each other’s throats. They want us to hate one another. Republican and Democrat are false constructs.
We humans are all related – just as we are related to the things that fly, swim, and crawl, the plants, the air, and the mountains. We are all part of this earth.
We have lost our spiritual connections to life. We must recover that precious connection. Otherwise we will remain lost in space.
John Rachel: We are grateful to Bruce Gagnon for sharing his valuable and thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. The Peace Dividend Strategy is not a meme or a bumper sticker. It is an end-to-end methodology for challenging the political establishment and removing from power those compromised individuals who work against the interests of the great majority of U.S. citizens. The only hope for our hyper-militarized nation is each and every one of us having a decisive voice in determining the future we want for ourselves and our children
Joe Lombardo is the co-coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and has been an organizer in the anti-war movement and a labor activist for decades. He is a cofounder and lead organizer for Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, a local anti-war group based near Albany, New York, a member of the Troy Area Labor Council, and former staff person of the Vietnam era National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC). He is the author of many articles and a frequent radio and TV commentator.
We focus here on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below of are exactly as he provided.
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.
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.
In the Paradigm for Peace model, the Roots of Violence are divided into seven categories. While a few of the categories aren’t as easily divided into defensive and aggressive motivations, for the most part, we examine how each party to the conflict may be defensively motivated or aggressively motivated to inflict violence with regard to each category. For example, with regard to the category Wealth, Land, and Possessions, a person using violence to protect his home from attack has a defensive motivation to use violence. A person using violence to attack another person’s home to seize that other person’s wealth and belongings has an aggressive motivation to use violence.
Matters can get complicated, and it can sometimes be quite difficult to distinguish between defensive and aggressive. Sometimes the motivations are mixed within a single person or appear defensive or aggressive simply depending upon one’s perspective. However, without getting all harried about trying to figure out who exactly is motivated by what, it’s hugely helpful to be generally aware of these two categories of violence and to think in these terms so that we never rule out the possibility of legitimate motives in the so-called bad guys and illegitimate motives in the so-called good guys.
Most importantly, it’s crucial to have policy solutions that address both Defensive and Aggressive Roots of Violence. After all, if US foreign policymakers’ policies are always based on the assumption that terrorists, Iranians, North Koreans, left-wing Latinos, and Russians are aggressive and malicious, then US policymakers will never implement policies that help address the very real and legitimate Defensive Roots of Violence in the so-called enemies. Also, note that while Defensive Roots of Violence have legitimate motivations, the use of violence for defensive reasons isn’t necessarily legitimate, especially if there are non-violent means to protect what’s under threat.
In the condensed analysis below, I tend to spend more time writing about the Defensive Roots of Russian Violence and the Aggressive Roots of US Violence, rather than the Aggressive Roots of Russian Violence and the Defensive Roots of US Violence. This imbalance is largely due to the fact that I’m much more aware of these particular roots of violence for these nations. I’m not deliberately hiding anything to create this imbalance but am sharing what I know. This angle also helps place a counterweight to the dominant narrative in the US media that Russia is aggressive and the US and the Ukrainian government are defensive. However, please understand that in a full analysis with cooperative dialogue, equal attention should be paid to all sides’ defensive fears and all sides’ aggressive motivations.
In this essay, we’ll look at the first of seven categories: Life and Safety.
If we were creating a quick chart of the Roots of Violence, we’d list down the left side of the chart the seven categories. Across the top, we’d write in the names of the players in the external and internal conflict. We’d look at the first category, Life and Safety. How do people feel that the lives and safety of those they care about are under threat?
For example, let’s start with Russia. We’d list under Russia’s and President Vladimir Putin’s fears for life several items. NATO has expanded straight across Europe into Slavic lands and former Soviet republics. This is obviously a severe threat to Russia’s survival. After all, NATO was formed precisely to combat the USSR, and now NATO is in Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It’s as if the American Southwest seceded, allied with Mexico, and deployed missiles in Texas aimed at Washington, DC.
While those who support NATO may think of NATO’s expansion as enhancing US and European security, they fail to recognize the psychological ramifications of NATO on potential enemies: its existence topped by its expansion could easily cause physical insecurity by creating an ever-present threat to Russia. Emotional insecurity can lead to hostility, thus augmenting physical insecurity. And that, in fact, has happened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This failure to sympathize with an enemy’s perspective, to be able to imagine an enemy’s feelings of being threatened, to respect the need for another’s emotional and psychological security, is the Achilles Heel of US foreign policymakers, who perpetually only think of how to control and dominate enemies. It’s the Achilles Heel because, by provoking rather than alleviating tension in the so-called enemy, US foreign policymakers actually weaken US security, weaken respect and genuine friendship for the US, and weaken the international foundations of democracy—caring equally for all. The resulting policies are also extremely costly and deadly. This is why in cooperative dialogue, or right now in this essay, it’s important for us to practice really sinking into Russia’s shoes and pretending we’re the leader of Russia, feeling these threats, and determined to protect our people.
When NATO expands, it means more than just a picture on the map of NATO covering nearly all of Europe. It means that physical weapons and military bases to potentially be used against Russia have also expanded in coverage across the continent. For example, Lockheed Martin’s Aegis Ashore Mark 41 Vehicle Land System with its SM-3 Block IIA missile interceptors has been deployed in Romania and Poland by the US through NATO. This system is capable of intercepting and destroying an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), thereby theoretically rendering ineffective Russia’s missiles and the strategy of mutual deterrence. If Russia can no longer feel safe, it will feel the need to develop more weapons and new strategies.
Moreover, the Mark 41 VLS, while allegedly intended solely for defensive purposes, could be fitted with aggressive weapons. 1 Making the weapon-imposed threat even more precarious is the fact that the Trump administration withdrew in 2018 from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which had previously regulated land-based ballistic missiles and missile launchers. Even more ominous are the joint US-Ukrainian and NATO-Ukrainian military training in the nations and seas bordering Russia. 2
US policymakers and media makers have denied Russia’s accusations of US chemical and biological weapon intentions in Ukraine, but with US policymakers and media makers so untruthful about so many things, even the representation of Putin’s essay, and with a terrible documented record throughout the decades of US presidential administrations lying to the American people and Congress, we would be foolish simply to believe these denials on faith alone. Therefore, we should open-mindedly consider these Russian reports and predictions. Russia’s Ministry of Defense recently claimed that forces loyal to Kiev are preparing a chemical attack in eastern Ukraine. Russia has also previously warned of chemical weapons being stored in Ukraine. US policy and media makers, as they have done repeatedly and without proof, reverse Russia’s claims and state that Russia is using its claim as a pretext for its own planned chemical attack. 3
As civilians, how can we know the truth? Who’s preparing a chemical attack? Is anyone? It’s impossible for us to know. But we should understand one thing that’s based upon a long record of US government lies to the American people: there is absolutely no reason to believe US policymakers more than Russian policymakers. Just because we are Americans and each of us may be truthful does not mean that American policymakers are truthful. Our individual identities as Americans are not melded with the identities of US policymakers. They are strangers to us and we do not know them at heart.
Russia has also released documents that allegedly prove that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has played a significant role in providing and seeking funding for a military biological program, particularly with the labs of Black & Veatch and Metabiota, in Ukraine. According to Russia’s Defense Minister Igor Kirillov, the Pentagon issued contracts with a number of labs, including Black & Veatch, Metabiota, and CH2M Hill, for this military biological program. Investors in the program have included Hunter Biden, his investment fund Seneca Rosemont, and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Documents have reportedly revealed Hunter Biden’s close connections with both the labs and with the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the part of the Department of Defense engaged in the biological weapons program.
In the past, the Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly drawn attention to the Pentagon’s military biological programs in former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. During its invasion, Russia found more than 30 biological laboratories in Ukraine, some of which may be for military purposes. In fact, Russia reports that it has found traces of a biological weapons program in the labs, which Ukraine reportedly was desperately trying to hide.4 Again, although US policymakers deny such an operation, they obviously would never admit it if it were true. And in the current climate, in which US policymakers automatically dismiss every single one of Russia’s fears as absurd, even the obviously valid ones, we cannot gauge the validity of Russia’s fears based upon US denials of their legitimacy.
In fact, a reading of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000) by Project for a New American Century is enough to be jolted into awareness of the ardent enthusiasm the neoconservative writers feel for conquering several other nations, for enhancing and preserving US hegemony, and for developing weapons including pocket-sized robots to be let loose on enemy territory, skin-patch pharmaceuticals to negate fear in US troops, and biological weapons to target specific genotypes—a recipe, perhaps, for genocide. 5
PNAC is defunct, but one of its co-founders, William Kristol, is an advisor to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a neoconservative-liberal hawk mix of individuals that has the singular mission of thwarting, weakening, and basically destroying Putin. PNAC’s other co-founder, Robert Kagan, is the husband of Biden’s Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, infamous for the leaked tapes at the time of the 2014 Ukrainian coup. She is also the former CEO of the similarly-sounding Center for a New American Security. To deny that US policymakers have the intention to develop biological weapons seems unwise.
In the column of our chart under Russian fears, we might also include the US-built Ukrainian naval base on the Black Sea, particularly because of the US ties. We could include Russian and German news reports of the presence in 2015 of US private military contractors connected with Academi in Ukraine training far right-wing Ukrainian extremists. 6 We also might investigate whether there were further results from meetings between Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy and Erik Prince, former head of the infamous Blackwater, regarding the development of a private military contract in Ukraine. 7
Instead of dismissing these fears as “phony”—as US policymakers and media makers perpetually do—we’d recognize the validity of each of these fears. This is how kind, responsible people treat others with fears. They listen to the fears, whether rational or irrational, until they understand the other’s feelings. Then they help them address these fears. Had the tables been turned with all of these military alliances, bases, weapons, and military drills transpiring along US borders or in former US territories or states, US policymakers would have been quaking in their boots long before this. The Russians have shown remarkable restraint.
The Russians also are not stupid and, unlike Uncle Sam, they’re not prone to war. They’re very unlikely to invade anywhere unless they’re feeling severely threatened by realistic, actual threats. They know full well from experience that any invasion attempt will be severely skewed by Western propaganda to make them look bad. With that in mind, it behooves us to seriously examine Russia’s and Putin’s fears, including the threats of chemical and biological weapons, for only something severely threatening must have drawn Russia out.
If Russian fears seem rational, participants should try to create solutions to give Russians valid reasons to no longer fear. Americans can’t simply say, “Trust us.” They have to provide valid reasons not based merely upon trust. If Russian fears come across through discussion as more irrational, then participants should work together supportively to uncover the psychological reasons for these irrational fears.
In dialogue, participants would discuss these fears and really try to step into Russia’s shoes to understand why these factors are mortally threatening. Participants would ideally reverse roles, or reverse the scenario and imagine a similar situation occurring to the US in reverse, such as if Alaska seceded, allied with Russia, and deployed missile launchers aimed at Washington, DC. The goal here is understanding and empathy—not control or intimidation of the other side, and certainly not dismissal of another’s fears as absurd.
For all those foreign policymakers who believe understanding and empathizing with others’ fears—especially enemies’ fears—is not appropriate to foreign policy, I suggest you find another line of work.
In light of these Russian fears, consider that statement made by Defense Secretary Austin, who expressed his belief that the US needs to “weaken” Russia “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”8 Austin totally misses the point: Russia invaded because it felt militarily threatened and it felt Ukrainians’ lives in Donetsk and Lugansk were threatened. Russia invaded because it felt existentially threatened by expanding US and NATO domination in Eastern Europe and Ukraine and by threats to Ukrainian lives in Donetsk and Lugansk. Why make it feel even more threatened by insisting that Russia become militarily weaker? It doesn’t make sense.
US policymakers persistently demonstrate zero capacity for understanding human dynamics. Their answer to those who resent US domination is always more US domination. Is it because US foreign policymakers want to dominate so completely that no significant signs of resistance are possible? But why? Is this some misguided attempt to seek pseudo-popularity by forcing itself upon those who don’t want it? Are policymakers mistaking domination for being liked and accepted? Is this craze for domination in part the result of clumsy social skills magnified by a billion? What on Earth is going on with these people in power?
And why wasn’t Austin’s idea of weakening an improperly-behaving nation to prevent future misbehavior suggested after the US invasion of Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, and Korea? Or after the first weapon shipment to the contras in Nicaragua? After the very first US extrajudicial drone attack? After the very first CIA coup? As far as I can see, the answer is that US foreign policymakers do not support justice. They support themselves.
To continue with our chart, we should include for Putin the fear of assassination, which he likely feels. After all, the CIA and its paid foreign agents are infamous for their assassinations which they inflict with impunity, as described in several books and articles, including William Blum’s Killing Hope. 9 The venomous anti-Putin US propaganda which falsely depicts him as both cruel and stupid, the economic sabotage against Russia by means of sanctions and shutting off Nord Stream 2, the cutting off of money to Russia, and even the collaboration with neo-Nazis are all reminiscent of the CIA’s propaganda and economic war against Chile’s President Salvador Allende. With its lies and economic tactics, the CIA helped foment riots and also funded the fascist Patria y Libertad thugs to help with the 9/11/1973 coup, in which Allende was killed. Patria y Libertad also helped ensure a gory aftermath for tens of thousands of civilians of Chile. A coup in Russia is obviously hoped for by American leaders. The blatantly propagandistic program by Infographics, “Russia’s Big Problem with Ukraine,” even portrays with its paper cut-out art a group of Russian troops leveling their weapons at a man intended to be Putin.10
We should also include for Putin’s and Russia’s fears some of the ideas Putin set forth in his February 2007 Munich speech, including Putin’s disappointment that the US and NATO nations failed to ratify the newly adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty. The original treaty of 1987 between Russian President Gorbachev and US President Reagan was adapted in 1999 to reflect the expansion of NATO and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. However, only Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed the new treaty.
It was an important treaty for Russia because NATO had expanded to include the nations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, but these nations were not parties to the original treaty. After years of hoping the other nations would sign, Russia pulled out of the treaty in December 2007. If the Baltic nations on the border of Russia were not required to observe the treaty, it didn’t make sense for Russia to observe it either. Russia blamed the West for not signing. The US and NATO nations blamed Russia for not complying with certain terms. Either way, one would think that intelligent negotiators talented in integrative negotiation could have worked something out.11
In the 2007 speech, Putin also expresses the dangers of weapon proliferation, nuclear arms, weapons in space, and the hyper-use of force by the US government. Putin offered Russia’s cooperation in disarmament, 12 but instead of reciprocation, his honorable speech was instead followed by a 15-year anti-Putin campaign 13 and by the continuation of US policies of proliferating weapons, revitalizing its nuclear arsenal, preparing for weapons in space, and favoring the hyper-use of force, by US troops and private military contractors.
After really sinking into Russia’s shoes to feel these fears, we’d step out of those shoes and then step into the shoes of Americans who mortally fear Russia. Now I’ll admit right here that I don’t understand US fears, so in this essay I won’t be able to fairly represent those fears. However, in an actual cooperative dialogue, the idea is to ensure it includes people who can sincerely represent US fears, both as American civilians and as US policymakers from groups such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Just as we did with Russia and Putin, we’d all sink into these people’s shoes and feel their fears and sincerely try to see their logic as they do. As with Russian fears, there may not be agreement as to which fears are rational and which are irrational. However, participants will try to provide valid reasons for Americans not to mortally fear Russia, and they’d also work together to try to uncover psychological reasons for irrational fears, including decades of propaganda and social dynamics within US culture.
So we’d ask, during the decade or two prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and also since the invasion, have any Americans felt their lives and safety were threatened by Russia? If so, how exactly? Did Americans or other NATO members feel the need for NATO expansion in order to feel safe and sleep peacefully at night? Was there disagreement amongst NATO members? Ukraine and Russia had improved their relations in 2010, when Ukraine officially abandoned the goal of joining NATO.14 Was the abandonment of this goal threatening to Americans? Which ones? Why?
Did any Americans feel a sense of lethal danger and an urgent need to send weapons to the Ukrainian government to fight in its civil war? Do Americans feel their current fears are connected with the decades of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda? Did they think of the USSR as malicious, belligerent, and untrustworthy then and do they think of Russia as malicious, belligerent, and untrustworthy now? What fatal scenario do some American civilians or policymakers fear could result from Russia’s actions?
Whether fears are rational or irrational, we must spend time in dialogue learning about the nature and causes of these American fears. They won’t go away just by dismissing them as absurd. And, frankly, I also don’t think they’ll go away by merely continuing an arms race, sending weapons, and devising lethal strategies for use against Russia. While weapons are one component of security, they’re not even half of what it takes to feel emotionally and psychologically secure and to actually be secure. That type of security requires—not the transfer to nations far and wide of an American form of plutocratic pseudo-democracy pinned upon elections, capitalism, privatization, globalization, and US dominance—but rather egalitarian justice, mutual understanding, and genuine friendship.
It’s not only foreigners who need these components to feel secure, it’s Americans. This is probably why US policymakers have been forever on this wild goose chase for security: they’re feeding an insatiable need for security that is insatiable precisely because they’re feeding it all the wrong food. They seek domination when what they need is friendship. They insist that others understand US goals and serve US interests, when what they really need is two-way mutual understanding and caring. They’re giving themselves junk food when what they really need are all the root vegetables of a big bowl of borsch.
Within Ukraine, we should ask Ukrainians from a range of perspectives how they felt about billions of dollars of US and NATO weapon shipments arriving since the civil war began in 2014. Did these weapons help them feel safer? Did they protect them from harm? Or did they put Ukrainians in greater danger from other Ukrainians and from Russia? Would Ukrainians be suffering now if the weapons had never been sent? Do Ukrainians feel the weapons helped resolve the problems that caused the civil war or did they make the problems worse? Did Ukrainian government members all agree that they wanted to receive US and NATO weapons? Or not? Were the weapons placed in responsible hands? What effect did US and NATO weapon shipments have on the effectiveness and strength of any formal or grassroots non-violent conflict resolution initiatives that may have been unfolding, including the Minsk Agreements?
We should also ask whether Russian weapons were sent to Donetsk and Lugansk, as the West claims. If so, how did these weapons make various Ukrainians feel with regard to their safety? Better or worse? The same set of questions we asked about US and NATO weapons should be asked about Russian weapons.
In the next part, we’ll look at threats to life within Ukraine with regard to the violence of Ukrainian ultranationalists.
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt, Project Co-Chairmen; Thomas Donnelly, Principal Author, (Washington, DC, 2000).
The Russia-Ukraine war has quickly turned into a global conflict. One of the likely outcomes of this war is the very redefinition of the current world order, which has been in effect, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago.
Indeed, there is a growing sense that a new global agenda is forthcoming, one that could unite Russia and China and, to a degree, India and others, under the same banner. This is evident, not only by the succession of the earth-shattering events underway, but, equally important, the language employed to describe these events.
The Russian position on Ukraine has morphed throughout the war from merely wanting to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine to a much bigger regional and global agenda, to eventually, per the words of Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, “put an end to the unabashed expansion” of NATO, and the “unabashed drive towards full domination by the US and its Western subjects on the world stage.”
On April 30, Lavrov went further, stating in an interview with the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, that Russia’s war “contributes to the process of freeing the world from the West’s neocolonial oppression,” predicated on “racism and an exceptionality.”
But Russia is not the only country that feels this way. China, too, even India, and many others. The meeting between Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 30, served as a foundation of this truly new global language. Statements made by the two countries’ top diplomats were more concerned about challenging US hegemony than the specifics of the Ukraine war.
Those following the evolution of the Russia-China political discourse, even before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24, will notice that the language employed supersedes that of a regional conflict, into the desire to bring about the reordering of world affairs altogether.
But is this new world order possible? If yes, what would it look like? These questions, and others, remain unanswered, at least for now. What we know, however, is that the Russian quest for global transformation exceeds Ukraine by far, and that China, too, is on board.
While Russia and China remain the foundation of this new world order, many other countries, especially in the Global South, are eager to join. This should not come as a surprise as frustration with the unilateral US-led world order has been brewing for many years, and has come at a great cost. Even the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, though timid at times, has warned against this unilaterality, calling instead on the international community to commit itself to “the values of multilateralism and diplomacy for peace.”
However, the pro-Russian stances in the South – as indicated by the refusal of many governments to join western sanctions on Moscow, and the many displays of popular support through protests, rallies and statements – continue to lack a cohesive narrative. Unlike the Soviet Union of yesteryears, Russia of today does not champion a global ideology, like socialism, and its current attempt at articulating a relatable global discourse remains, for now, limited.
It is obviously too early to examine any kind of superstructure – language, political institutions, religion, philosophy, etc – resulting from the Russia-NATO global conflict, Russia-Ukraine war and the growing Russia-China affinity.
Though much discussion has been dedicated to the establishing of an alternative monetary system, in the case of Lavrov’s and Yi’s new world order, a fully-fledged substructure is yet to be developed.
New substructures will only start forming once the national currency of countries like Russia and China replace the US dollar, alternative money transfer systems, like CIPS, are put into effect, new trade routes are open, and eventually new modes of production replace the old ones. Only then, superstructures will follow, including new political discourses, historical narratives, everyday language, culture, art and even symbols.
The thousands of US-western sanctions slapped on Russia were largely meant to weaken the country’s ability to navigate outside the current US-dominated global economic system. Without this maneuverability, the West believes, Moscow would not be able to create and sustain an alternative economic model that is centered around Russia.
True, US sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and others have failed to produce the coveted ‘regime change’, but they have succeeded in weakening the substructures of these societies, denying them the chance to be relevant economic actors at a regional and international stage. They were merely allowed to subsist, and barely so.
Russia, on the other hand, is a global power, with a relatively large economy, international networks of allies, trade partners and supporters. That in mind, surely a regime change will not take place in Moscow any time soon. The latter’s challenge, however, is whether it will be able to orchestrate a sustainable paradigm shift under current western pressures and sanctions.
Time will tell. For now, it is certain that some kind of a global transformation is taking place, along with the potential of a ‘new world order’, a term, ironically employed by the US government more than any other.
Brzezinski was a very powerful National Security Advisor to President Carter. Before that, he founded the Trilateral Commission. Later he taught Madeline Albright and many other key figures in US foreign policy.
Brzezinski initiated the “Afghanistan Trap”. That was the secret 1979 US program to mobilize and support mujahedin foreign fighters to invade and destabilize Afghanistan. In this period, Afghanistan was undergoing dramatic positive changes. As described by Canadian academic John Ryan, “Afghanistan once had a progressive secular government, with broad popular support. It had enacted progressive reforms and gave equal rights to women.”
The Brzezinski plan was to utilize reactionary local forces and foreign fighters to create enough mayhem that the government would ask the neighboring Soviet Union to send military support.
Compassion for Ukrainians victimized by Russia’s violence demonstrates that human hearts care. However, beneath the visible current of compassion there’s an alarming, dangerous dynamic at play.
What’s hair-raising about this crisis is not only the violence but the fact that US political leaders and media makers are not recognizing positive and negative motivations on both sides of conflict. Instead, they’re deliberately creating an inaccurate good vs. evil storyline, a storyline that ignites unwarranted, dangerous feelings of self-righteous hatred against Russia.
The US perpetually perceives its role in conflict as that of a heroic rescuer or innocent victim upholding humanity and freedom against evil persecutors. However, 245 years of US history reveal that this perception is fiction, a psychological construct. Psychological analysts Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward called the persecutor, victim, and rescuer scenario a “cultural script.”
Examination of 245 years of US history reveals that the perception of always being a good guy fighting evil is fiction, a psychological construct. In fact, good and bad, truths and lies invariably exist on both sides of conflict.
Nonetheless, to deceive others and perhaps themselves, US policymakers’ pattern of relentlessly legitimating their violence, deadly sanctions, and foreign coups by denying the validity of enemy grievances, hiding their own greed and aggressive motives, refusing to cooperatively negotiate, concealing enemy negotiation offers, fabricating lies, omitting significant facts, using false pretexts, and overlooking the disastrous results of a pseudo-religious faith in the problem-solving magic of weapons is so predictable that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more enraging, pathetic, boring, or nauseating.
Consider one persecutor-victim-hero drama that began in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, livid over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claimed it was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Actually, Afghanistan’s Marxist government, which had been trying to reform the extreme, unjust inequalities of wealth and land ownership in Afghanistan, had requested Soviet assistance against insurgents, but the USSR, the “evil persecutor,” didn’t want to send troops. When the Soviets finally complied, they explained it was because of secret US involvement in Afghanistan. The world called the Soviets liars.
Two decades later US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that Carter had begun aiding the insurgent mujahideen—the “heroes”—six months prior to the entry of the persecutors, the Soviets. A delighted Brzezinski knew this could provoke the Soviets to invade and get mired in their own “Vietnam.” Convinced of Soviet evil and mujahideen goodness, US policymakers ignored that the mujahideen skinned Soviet POWs alive.
And now we’re to believe that weapon shipments and sanctions are needed for the US to help rescue Ukraine from “evil” Russia.
The first step in convincing the world to believe the script’s good vs. evil dynamics is to depict Russia as the persecutor who’s motivated, not by fear, but by evil. No problem! Simply label Putin as paranoid and discount Russian fears as ludicrous: NATO’s expansion into Slavic lands, NATO—Ukraine military collaboration, US missile bases in eastern Europe, anti-Russian policies and prejudice in Ukraine, neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine, neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Ukraine’s police, military, and government, the manipulation of Ukraine by Western profit-seekers, and Western economic and political conquest—likely of Russia itself.
The next step is to paint the US as a heroic rescuer motivated purely by integrity and compassion. Simple! Muffle up all greed-related motives for antagonizing Russia: US weapon industry profits, NATO’s agenda for bases on the Black Sea, IMF goals, ExxonMobil’s coveting Black Sea fossil fuel deposits, and Biden’s connections with Ukraine’s largest natural gas corporation. Then, conceal US hopes to dominate the global energy trade, maintain the dollar as the international energy trade currency, displace Russia from Europe’s gas market, shut down Nord Stream 2, and export fracked liquefied natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.
Also ignored are the biases and aims of those social and business circles who are forever dictating US foreign policy according to their pecuniary priorities and uncooperative, control-oriented habits of international relations. President Biden’s administration, for example, includes many members of the Alliance for Securing Democracy—with an advisory board that combines neoconservatives with liberal hawks, Albright Stonebridge Group—with its interest in Russian business acquisitions, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS, whose donors include multiple weapon corporations, the European Union, US Department of Defense, Finland’s Defense Ministry, Amazon, Google, and ExxonMobil, was formerly led by President Biden’s current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, co-founded the conquest-seeking neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Yet we’re to assume that donors’ priorities aren’t skewing foreign policy in dysfunctional ways.
With Russia’s fears dismissed and US greed disguised, the good vs. evil script is further strengthened by permitting only shallow public analysis. For example, how do we know that Russia wasn’t deliberately provoked so that the ulterior goals of certain American social circles could be advanced under the guise of nobly responding to Russia’s aggression? The topic isn’t permitted into discussion.
Another topic given quarter-inch deep analysis is Biden’s seemingly fair-minded declaration that each nation has the right to choose alliances. It’s an unusual statement coming from a “you’re with us or against us” nation that has punished or ousted national leaders who refused to sever alliances with the USSR or Cuba.
Nuland’s leaked tapes from 2014 (which mention Biden and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan) and a US record of instigating coups indicate that Americans were likely involved in promoting the bloody 2014 coup of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich to install anti-Russian leadership agreeable to European Union and NATO ties. So does Biden’s “right to choose alliances” proclamation apply to nations before a US-approved coup or only afterwards?
Another enraging example of shallow analysis is the opinion falsely parroted by US “experts” that Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” lays bare Putin’s imperialist vision for Ukraine and his lack of recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Whether the experts are deliberately lying or lack reading comprehension skills, their claim is false and, given the self-righteous hatred their claim generates, utterly irresponsible.
Nowhere in the essay does Putin speak of conquering Ukraine or refusing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin specifically describes the relationship between the US and Canada as the type of relationship Russia seeks with Ukraine. When he speaks of “unity,” he’s not speaking of dissolving Ukraine’s political sovereignty. He’s speaking of cultural and historical ties between the two nations.
Putin’s description of the Bolsheviks’ creation of borders never suggests that he’s doing away with them. It’s possible he’s implying that Donetsk, Lugansk, and certainly Crimea have large Russian populations and do not necessarily belong in Ukraine, especially if Ukraine’s post-coup government is harboring neo-Nazism and installing language and indigenous people policies of a deliberate anti-Russian nature. Note that Ukraine and the US are the only two nations in the UN to vote against the recent resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism.
Of course, US policymakers are not uncomfortable with Nazism and, following WWII, employed one thousand Nazis to spy on Russia. And it was US banks and companies such as Ford, General Motors, and du Pont that opportunistically helped fund Hitler’s war arsenal. Even in 1973, the US worked with pro-Nazi collaborators and US corporate funds to plant protests, propaganda, economic sabotage, and violence that climaxed in the CIA’ s horrific 9/11/73 coup of Chile’s Salvador Allende. It’s not surprising that in 2014, Russian news sources claimed that US private military contractors were training right-wing Ukrainian extremists.
In his essay, Putin clearly states his wish to negotiate with Ukraine, but not with Ukrainian leaders who are mere representatives of Western profiteers eager to use Ukraine’s land and resources for their own benefit. But, of course, US commentators either ignore the statement or, forgetting US history, discount Putin’s fears of Western profiteering as conspiracy theory.
Double standards also fortify the script. Russia’s invasions are motivated by belligerence, never legitimate fears, while US invasions are motivated by legitimate fears, never belligerence. Same behavior, different judgment.
Headlines scream of savage Russian war crimes. TV reporters interview sobbing Ukrainians. Yet US, NATO, and Ukrainian war crimes are barely publicized, their victims ignored. Same actions, different judgment. To learn about US war crimes and Afghan and Iraqi suffering, you’ve got to read investigative reporters’ books.
American groupthink, inflated by its self-righteous role in the script, and seeming to borrow from middle-school social dynamics, jeers and smears President Putin’s every word as absurd and staged. But we’re to trust Biden as honest, unstaged, unconcealing. No proof is needed. Just faith in the script.
Putin’s wish to protect Donetsk and Lugansk, self-declared republics since 2014, and end Kiev’s 8-year war that has killed 14,000 is automatically mocked as false pretext for conquest. Yet US wishes to protect Ukraine from Russia are trusted as caring, without ulterior design. The role of private military contractors, NATO, and the US in escalating civil war and provoking Russia by arming Ukraine with billions in weapons since 2014 rather than committing to non-violently resolve Ukraine’s internal conflict remains shamefully unassessed.
The consequences of belief in this drama? The US habitually uses exaggerated fears of evil enemies as false justification for colossal military budgets, NATO expansion, more military bases, troops, weapons, and nukes—all of which pour gasoline on the world tinderbox of tension, drain desperately-needed funding, and fail to resolve conflict.
If evil is equated with enemies, it becomes deceptively simple for “heroes” to champion goodness: bomb enemies into submission, impose deadly sanctions, strangulate funding, send weapons, engineer coups. But none of these methods nurture goodness. The truth is, those convinced they’re fighting evil are frequently blinded to the immorality and injustice of their own actions against people who aren’t so evil after all.
The good vs. evil script is also unjust because it enables the “innocent” to get away with all they’ve done to exacerbate conflict. The script can even enable the “innocent,” including Biden administration neoconservatives and liberal hawks, to slickly seize power, resources, and markets from those deemed evil.
US leaders’ promotion of this good vs. evil storyline appears compassionate, but it isn’t against killing. It isn’t about justice. It’s about pushing a script that provides pretext on the part of those proclaiming their own goodness to inflict injustice and violence against Russia and Putin, already verbally crucified by a mob of liars. It’s about solidifying our allegiance to US policymakers’ decisions about whom we should kill and whom we should cry for. Yet policymakers step beyond Constitutional grounds when they use their power to turn our hearts on and off, to bait us to hate some and love others to serve their greed for Mid-Eastern, Ukrainian, and Russian wealth.
We’ve got to scrap the script and view conflict impartially. We deserve accurate, sophisticated information about conflict, not propaganda that teaches us to hate. We need full truth to help us ground irrational fears of bad guys, cure the sickness of greed, and offer caring and friendship, not just for those falsely deemed innocent and heroic, but for all of us, with 360◦ of empathy, all the way around the world.
One of the main problems with Western media (other than their non-stop anti-Russian propaganda), is the narrow and parochial manner in which they conceive world events. Like realists and liberals of international relations theory, they analyze world events two countries at a time, for example, the U.S. vs Russia. They appear to have little conception of interdependence, like Russia, China, and Iran as a single block. Or the U.S., England, and Israel as another block. No state can make any moves without considering the causes and consequences of their actions for their interdependent states. Secondly, these talking heads fail miserably in understanding that conflicts between states are inseparable from the evolution of global capitalism which, in many respects, is stronger than any state. Thirdly, their “analysis” fails to consider that the world capitalist system has evolved over the last 500 years, as I will soon present. We will see that what is going on in Ukraine is part of a much larger tectonic struggle between Eastern China, Russia, and Iran to create a multipolar world while being desperately opposed by a declining West, headed by the United States and its minions.
A Brief History of Modern Capitalism
According to world systems theory, the global capitalist system has gone through four phases. In each phase, there was a dominant hegemon. First, there was the merchant capital of Italy that lasted from 1450-1640. This was followed by the great Dutch seafaring age from 1610-1740. Next, there was the British industrial system from 1776 to World War I. Lastly, the Yankee system which lasted from 1870 to 1970. Note that over these 500 years the pace of change quickened. In the Italian phase, the city states of Venice and Genoa rose and fell over 220 years. By the time we get to the United States, the time of rise and decline is 100 years. All this has been laid out by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long 20th century. In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi also lays out the reasons he is convinced that China will be the leading hegemon in the next phase of capitalism.
Five Types of Capitalism
Historically there have been five types of capitalism. The first is merchant capital in which profits are made by trade, selling cheap and buying dear. This is what Venice and Genoa did, as did Dutch seafarers on a grander scale. Next, is agricultural capitalism, including the slave system of the United States, Britain, and parts of the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. Then, the British invented the industrial capitalism system in which profit was made by investing the infrastructure of society: railroads, factories, and surplus labor from the wage labor system. Lastly, especially in the 20th century, we have two other forms of capitalism. In addition to being an industrial power after World War II, the United States used its industrial power to invest in the military arms industry and relied on finance capital (stocks and bonds).
Destructive Forms of Capitalism
In the later stage of all four systems, making money from commodities or technologies becomes problematic because it becomes unpredictable what people will buy. For example, after the Depression from 1929-1941, the United States got out of the depression by investing in the military. This was so successful that after World War II, capitalists began investing in the military even during peacetime (Melman, After Capitalism). It provided a much more predictable profit as long as countries continued to go to war. This encourages arming your own country or supplying the whole world, which is what the United States does today. There is also finance capital, where banks invest in stocks, bonds and financial instruments rather than infrastructure (as industrial capitalists did). For the past 50 years military and finance capital are primarily where the ruling class in Yankeedom has made its profits.
In the early phases of capitalism, in all four cycles, commodities were produced which required money as mediation, but the purpose was to produce more commodities and technologies. In the decaying part of the cycle, capitalists would rather invest in finance capital than industrial capital because of the quick turn-around in profits. Investing in building bridges, repairing roads, or building schools will surely benefit capitalists in the long run. Smooth supply chains for capitalist profit and a sound education in high school and college would ensure that workers not only know how to do their jobs but that they would be creative-thinkers and innovators. Capitalists these days don’t want to invest in these things, and this is why the infrastructure in Yankeedom is falling apart and the Yankee population cannot compete with students from other countries with better educational systems.
What is World Systems Theory?
World systems theory is a macro-sociological theory of long-term social change which includes economic theory and world history. It is provocative in at least three ways. One, its basic unit of analysis is the entire world-system of capitalism rather than nation-states. Second, it argues that the so-called socialist societies were not really socialist, but rather state-capitalist. Third, global capitalism organizes itself into a transnational division of labor which ignores the boundaries of nation-states. World-systems theory has been used by historians, international relations theorists, and international political economists to explain the rise and fall of nation-states, the increase and decrease in stratification patterns, as well as rise and decline of imperialism. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Terry Boswell have specialized in understanding social movements and the timing and placing of revolutions from a world-systems perspective.
Economic Zones Within the World-system
Overview of the core, periphery
World-systems are divided into three zones: the core, the semi-peripheral, and the peripheral countries. Economically and politically, core countries dominate other countries without being dominated. Semi-periphery countries are dominated by the core, and, in turn, dominate the periphery. The periphery are dominated by both. Part of the wealth of core countries comes from their exploitation of the peripheral countries’ land and labor through colonization.
Core and periphery
The core countries control most of the wealth in the world capitalist system. Workers are highly specialized, high technology is used. It has an industrial-electronic base. They extract raw materials from the peripheral countries and sell peripheral countries finished products. Core countries have the most highly specialized workers and a relatively small agricultural base, whereas peripheral countries have strong agricultural or horticultural bases and have a semi-skilled urban working class. The peripheral countries have relatively unspecialized labor whose work is labor-intensive with low wages. Much of the work done in peripheral countries is commercial agriculture—the production of coffee, sugar, and cotton.
The core countries are the home of the transnational corporations who control the world. Additionally, the core countries control the major banking institutions that provide international loans, such as the IMF and the World Bank. Finally, the core countries have the most powerful militaries. Paradoxically, when core countries are at their peak, their militaries are not very active. They only become more active as a core country goes into decline, as in the United States. Core countries typically have the most highly trained workers. In their heyday, core countries have strong centralized states that provide for pensions, unemployment, and road construction. In their weak stage, states withdraw these benefits and invest in their military to protect their assets abroad as their own territory falls apart. Core countries have large tax bases and, at their best, support infrastructural development.
The periphery nations own very little of the world’s means of production. In the case of African states or tribes, they have great amounts of natural resources, including diamonds and minerals, but these are extracted by the core countries. Furthermore, core states are usually able to purchase raw materials and cheap labor from non-core states at low prices and yet demand higher prices for their exports to non-core states. Core states have access to cheap skilled professional labor through migration (brain drain) from semi-peripheral states . Peripheral countries don’t have a solid tax base because their states have to contend with rival ethnic and tribal forces who are hardly convinced that taxes are good for them and their sub-national identities.
Peripheral countries often do not have a diversified economic base and are forced by the world market to produce one product. A good example of this is Venezuela and its oil. Peripheral countries have relatively steeper stratification patterns because there are no middle classes for the wealth to spread across. A tiny landed elite at the top sells off most of the land to transnational corporations. The state tends to be both weak and strong. States in the periphery have difficulty forming and sustaining their own national economic policy because foreign corporations want to come and go as they please. On the other hand, if a nationalist or a socialist rise to power, the state will be very strong and dictatorial. This is because they are constantly at war with transnational corporations who seek to overthrow them. Since transnational corporations often do this through oppositional parties, those in power are extremely suspicious of oppositional parties. Hence their label as “authoritarian”. In contemporary world systems, peripheries are found in parts of Latin America and in the most extreme form in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Semi-periphery
The semi-periphery contains countries that as a result of national liberation movements and class struggles have risen out of the periphery and have some characteristics of the core. They can also be composed of formerly core countries that have declined. For example, Spain and Portugal were once core countries in Early Modern Europe. Semi-peripheral countries often take over industries the core no longer wants such as second-generation computers, appliances, or transportation systems. Semi-peripheral states enter the world systems with some degree of autonomy rather than simply a subordinate country. These industries are not strong enough to compete with core countries in “free trade”. Therefore, they tend to apply protectionist policies towards their industry. They tend to export more to peripheral states and import more from core states in trade. In the 21st century, states like Brazil, Argentina, Russia, India, Israel, China, South Korea and South Africa (BRICS) are usually considered semi peripheral.
As I said above, the world capitalist system has changed four times in the last 500 years and each time not only have the configurations of the core countries changed but so have the semi peripheral countries in the world systems. For at least half of capitalist world systems, there were some countries that were outside the periphery, including the United States. Semi-peripheral countries are not fully industrialized countries, but they have scientists and engineers which can lead to some wealth.
Which countries are in the core periphery and semi periphery countries today?
The core countries in the world today are the United States, Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian social democratic countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Minor core countries are England, France, Italy, and Spain. Eastern European countries are in the semi-periphery. South of the border, there are four semi-periphery countries: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. More powerful up and coming semi-peripheral states include Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, China, and India. Most of Africa is in the periphery of the world systems with the exception of South Africa (semi-periphery).
Where did world systems theory come from?
Immanuel Wallerstein was a sociologist who specialized in African studies, so he had first-hand knowledge of the reality of exploitation by colonists. He was influenced by the work of Ferdinand Braudel who wrote a great three-volume history of capitalism. Wallerstein was also influenced by Marx and Engels, but he thought their history of capitalism was too Eurocentric. He emphasized that the core countries did not just exploit their own workers, but they have made great profits through the systematic exploitation of the peripheral countries for hundreds of years.
Modernization theory
World systems theory was in part a reaction against the anti-communist, modernization theory of international politics that prevailed after World War II into the 1960’s. Please see the table below which compares world systems theory to modernization theory.
Dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank
Around the same time as world systems theory developed, Andre Gunder Frank developed what came to be called “dependency theory”. This theory also challenged modernization theory’s assumption that countries that were called “traditional societies” were improved by contact with the core countries. He claimed that they were systematically exploited by the core countries, made worse than they were before they had any contact with them. As long ago as 1998, Gunder Frank predicted the rise of China. See his book ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
Karl Polyani
Other influences on the world-systems theory come from a scholar of comparative economic systems, Karl Polyani. His major contribution is to show that there was no capitalism in tribal or agricultural civilizations and that the “self-subsisting” economy of capitalism was a relatively recent development. Wallerstein reframed this in world systems terms, with the tribal as “mini-systems”, agricultural civilization as “empires” and the capitalist system as “world economies”. Nikolai Kondratiev introduced patterns he saw in the capitalist world economy that centered around cycles of crisis and wars within very specific time periods.
Interstate System
As I said earlier, in international relations theory, realist and neo-conservative theory and neoliberal theories of the state treat each state as if they were separate units. Applied to today, that would formulate world conflict as a battle between, say, the United States and Russia. Neo-conservative and neoliberal theory treat any alliance between states as secondary epiphenomenon that can be dissolved without too much trouble. Secondly, both these theories operate as if interstate politics are relatively autonomous from economics. To the extent to which these theories mention capitalism, it is the domestic economy of nation-states. Each tries to hide the international nature of capitalism and the extent to which transnational corporations can, and do, override national interests. The ideology of the interstate system is sovereign equality, but this is practically overridden as states are treated as neither sovereign nor equal, especially in Africa.
World systems theory sees states differently. For one thing, nation-states are not like Hobbes atoms which crash against each other in a war of all against all. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, fresh after the Thirty Years’ War, was an attempt to move beyond dynastic empires to nation-states. In core capitalist countries there were never single nation states. The Treaty created a system of nation-states which had rules of engagement, treaties, do’s and don’ts.
Today, between the core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries lies a system of interconnected state relationships. This interstate system arose either as a concomitant process or as a consequence of the development of the capitalist world-system over the course of the “long” 16th century as states began to recognize each other’s sovereignty.
Between these economic zones there were no enforceable rules about how nation-states should act, outside of not impeding the flow of capital between zones. Political domestic elites, international elites, and corporations competed and cooperated with each other, the results of which no one intended. Unsuccessful attempts have been made by the League of Nations and later the United Nations to create an international state. However, nation-states have been unwilling to give up their weapons. Therefore, the international anarchy of capitalist production is still unchecked. The function of the state is to regulate the flow of capital, labor, and commodities across borders and to enforce the structure of market rates. Not only do strong states impose their will on weak states. Strong states also impose limitations on other strong states, as we are seeing with US sanctions against Russia.
Who Will Be the Next World-Economy Hegemon?
Situation in Ukraine
Everything about Ukraine needs to be understood as the desperate clawing of a Yankee empire terrified of being left behind. The U.S. has so far convinced Europe to stay away from Russia and China, but it has nothing to offer. As Gary Olsen said, the Europeans may slowly make deals with Russia and China because they have some sense of where the future lies. So, Western hydra-headed totalitarian media all speak with the same voice: RUSSIA, RUSSIA, EVIL RUSSIA. EVIL PUTIN. Putin certainly had nerve wanting a national economy with its own economic policy. God forbid! But the time is up for Yankeedom and no terrorist police, no military drones, no Republicrats, and no stock exchange jingling with the trappings of divine honor can stop it.
The weakness of Europe
So, if Yankeedom is in decline (and even Brzezinski admitted this) who are the new contenders? Up until maybe five years ago, I thought Germany might be, with its industrial base and its strong working class. But in the last five years German standards of living have declined. It seems that the EU is in the midst of cracking up. There is no leadership with the departure of Angela Merkel. Macron is on the way out in France. All the other countries in Europe, including Italy, are under water with debt. England is the puppy dog of the United States and hasn’t been a global power in over 100 years. Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece could be helped enormously by allaying themselves with Russia and China, but at this point most Europeans have been bullied and complicit in myopically siding with a collapsing United States. There is a good chance the US will drag most of Europe down with them.
Collapse of the core zones?
As we have seen, according to world systems theory, the history of capitalism has had three zones: core, periphery, and semi-periphery. The countries that have inhabited the three zones have changed along with the dominant hegemon over the last 500 years, and we are now in unprecedented territory. There is a good chance that the entire batch of formerly core states, the United States, Britain, France, and the west will collapse and that the core capitalist system will be without a hegemon (with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries). China seems to be about ten years away from assuming that position.
2022-2030 the reign of the semi-periphery?
So, is it fair to say there is a huge tectonic shift where most of the core countries will collapse and the world system will have no core for maybe 20 years? It seems clear that the new hegemon is going to be China. Arrighi and Gunder Frank both thought this. But China is still a semi-periphery country and it might take 10-15 years to enter the core. Meanwhile its allies, Russia and Iran, are also semi-periphery countries. In South America, Argentina had the foresight to sign on the Chinese Belt Road Initiative. Brazil and Chile are still uncommitted to China and occupy a semi-peripheral status. The big country in Asia is India. It is very important to the Yankees not to lose control of India, and they have all the reason in the world to beat war drums in an attempt to demonize China. If a right winger such as Modi can refuse to side against Russia in the current events in Ukraine, will a more moderate or social democratic president of India have the vision to see the future lies in aligning with China? I wouldn’t count on it given the behavior of green-social democrat leadership in Germany.
The only European countries who seem to have made their way through 40 years of Neoliberal austerity, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of fascist parties in Europe are the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. There is no reason why they could not maintain core status, though China would be the leading power.
The new hegemon China and the world-system in 2030
I can imagine the world-system in 2030 could consist of China and the Scandinavian countries in the core, with Russia, Iran, and maybe Brazil, Argentina and Chile on the semi-periphery along with possibly India. I don’t know where to place the US and Europe. Since they are drunk with finance capital, it is unfair to put them in the semi-periphery, which is usually involved in productive scientific endeavors. Yet they are more productive than the peripheral countries. Africa could be the last battleground between the decadent Yankee and European imperialists who live on as neo-colonial crypto-imperialists attempting to either sell arms to Africans or directly set up regimes and enslave Africans to work the mines.
If China is able to develop African productive forces with the Belt Road Initiative, it might be an incentive to calm down the ethnic warfare there. It would be a wonderful thing if the African states could finally control the enormous wealth of their country. We cannot expect too much from China. The best they could do would be to invest in cultivating scientists and engineers to build up Africa as a fully industrialized continent. To me, what matters about China is not arguing whether or not it is really socialist, but that it is doing what Marx liked best about capitalism: developing the productive forces.
The prospects for a world state?
We cannot expect the Yankee state to decline peacefully and not start World War III. Is it possible to have a global capitalist realignment without starting World War III? As Chris Chase-Dunn has advocated for decades, we need a world state that has the capability to enforce a ban on interstate warfare. That is not likely now. The only attempts at this: the League of Nations and the United Nations happened after the misery of two world wars. Both attempts at world state have failed because nation-states would not agree to give up their weapons.
What about world ecology?
But as world systems theorist Chris Chase Dunn points out, a Chinese-centered world still inherits the increasing ecological destruction that has been an inherent part of the world system since the industrial revolution and now the global pandemic. This includes extreme weather (hot and cold), pollution of land and oceans with plastics and the products of industrialization like carbon, flooding from global warming, and desertification of lands due to droughts and monocropping.
What about Marx’s dream of shrinking the ratio between freedom and necessity in the light of ecological disaster?
For Marx and Engels, the dream of socialism was based on abundance. Unfortunately, because socialism first took place in what Wallerstein would call peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, socialism has come to be associated with poverty. An implication that could be drawn under socialism is that people should expect to be poor and share the poverty equally. That is the opposite of how Marx and Engels saw things. They hoped that socialism would first break out in the west in an industrialized country, with an organized working-class party taking the lead. They hoped that the revolution of overthrowing capitalism would preserve its material abundance, technology, and scientific achievements, not tear them to the ground. They wanted to develop the forces of production that capitalism unleashed while abolishing the political economy of private property over means of production. As socialism developed, the collective creativity of workers would shrink the ratio between necessary work and freedom. What does this mean?
This meant that workers would either:
a) work less and produce the same amount
b) work the same amount but produce more
c) work more and produce much more
In other words, workers would have an increase in the number of choices of what to do with their free time because of an increase in the technology and collective creativity to produce more with less. My question is, given the irreversible ecological situation we are in, is it still realistic to expect socialism will continue to be based on abundance? I can imagine that the way China is going, in that part of the world it may still be possible. I also suspect that in the Scandinavian countries it might be possible. The problem is that global pandemics, extreme weather, flooding, desertification, and pollution cannot easily, if at all, be contained within countries that are capitalist or socialist.
How Reliable is World-systems Theory?
I will limit criticisms of world systems theory to those of a political and economic nature. One common criticism is the struggle to do empirical research with a unit of analysis being the entire world system. This is not to say world systems theorists do not do empirical work, because they do. It is more a matter of how to derive meaningful relationships between variables at such a complex level of abstraction. Statistics for individual nation states are easier to manage, although nation-states are not autonomous actors.
Another criticism is that the successes of existing socialist states are in danger of being given the short shrift. Like many in the West, the first line of criticism by world systems theorists of socialist countries is that they are one-party dictatorships. While this may be true, there is good reason why communist parties in power are nervous about the prospect of oppositional parties being used by foreign capitalists to overthrow them. In addition, socialist countries have better records than capitalist countries on the periphery in the fields of literacy (reading and writing), low-cost housing, healthcare, and free education. Please see Michael Parenti, Black Shirts and Reds for more on this.
The third major criticism comes from orthodox Marxist, Robert Brenner. Brenner claims that the emphasis by world systems theorists on the relationship between economic zones comes at a cost to understanding the class structure within and between nation-states. I think world systems theorists are well aware of class relationships, but they choose to focus on the capitalist relationships between states. Lastly, Theda Skocpol argues that world systems theory understates the power of the state in international affairs. The state is not just the creature of transnational capital. States engage in military competition which long s capitalism. State structures compete with each other.
On a positive note, as I said earlier, Christopher Chase-Dunn has done some creative work with Terry Boswell in tracking the timing and location of rebellions and revolutions in the 500 years of the world systems in Spirals of Capitalism and Socialism. In addition, he wrote a very groundbreaking book with Tom Hall Rise and Demise, which challenges Wallerstein by suggesting that there were precapitalist world systems that go all the way back to hunter-gatherers. Also see my book with him, Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present.
Note to our readers: These are letters from a comrade of ours who currently lives in Russia. English is not the first language of HCE so please be understanding. In order to preserve the integrity of these letters, we kept the original phrasing as best we could.
March 11th
Hello Barbara,
Thank you for your message and concern. My wife and I are passing through a difficult phase in our lives. After our second vaccination in December, we, for some reason or other, went through a period of being sick, myself in a light form while my wife gave me a scare. Anyway, that is behind us. Barbara, I thought that in my late years, being 80 years old now, we would settle down and I would take good care of my wife, go for long walks in the forest-parks of Moscow. Fate, however, had other plans for us, and here we are in the midst of another war and sanctions surrounded by nations led by clowns, comedians, lunatics, and obsessed madmen. Allow me to give you my opinion on a number of issues.
The dependence of Europe on Russian natural gas
The US tried all the possible tricks to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Generally, they want this energy market for US companies, in spite if the fact that gas will be in liquid form and transported by ships. The port that has to receive the liquid gas must have a very expensive plant. Besides the market factor there is the geopolitical factor of having Europe depending on the US for their energy. Russia has always delivered through thick and thin and always will. I wonder whether the US and their companies will be just as trustworthy.
Zelensky’s dirty bomb threat
Chernobyl, the place where the terrible catastrophe happened, is located in the Ukraine. Zelensky declared that he would consider making an atom bomb if not given the security guarantees that he was asking for from Europe and the US on the second day of the war. He had in mind using materials from the damaged reactor and make a “dirty bomb”. I think that was the last straw. Russian special troops immediately moved to occupy Chernobyl. Thank goodness not a single shot was fired as the Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. The 8 years that the people of Donbas served as a shooting gallery for the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists has finally come to an end. Chernobyl at the present is being patrolled by joint Russian – Ukrainian units. There is a huge Sarcophagi covering the damaged reactor (if you see a clip or pictures, it is so ominous and awe striking. It makes you shiver).
The Mood of the Russian people
Now let me discuss the mood of the Russian people who I see on the street, the people who I talk to, and what I read and watch on local tv. Russians differ in their assessment of the war. By far the broadest section supports their president, and especially their armed forces. They are mainly working class, solid people, nationalists, and the majority of the left including CPRF.
Since the nomination of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ obsession with Russia’s and Trump’s supposed ties with them, these Democrats have played a terrible role in pushing the Russian people more to the right. Anything that is seen as part of the Democrats, like BLM, MeToo, or LGBT is derided here. White supremacy is on the rise. I have tried on many occasions to explain, for example, BLM. The conversation usually begins with “I don’t take a knee before a N.” So, I have to explain the rules of US football, who Colin Kaepernick is and the conditions of his kneeling during the national anthem. Presenting the subtleties of this is not easy when Russians are already riled up. The Communist Party in Ukraine was prohibited many years ago and in this void came nationalism and religion. Both cards were used to divide the Russians and the Ukrainians. Russia has officially declared that the aim of their operation in the Ukraine is demilitarization and denazification.
Then there is a loud minority of very young people guided by NGOs financed by the West, part of the humanitarian intellectuals, artists, and actors. They are against their army and its operations in the Ukraine. The Russian Government has started taking measures against openly anti-Russian channels like Echo Moscow and Dozhd/Rain.
The situation in Russia is characterized by a retreat of the liberals and pro-western opposition. The polls show that the support for the president is 75% as of today, March 11. The street is calm, my apartment is near a university and campus and I see hundreds of young people going about their studies. I see people shopping, and I go shopping too. No panic, no rush. If the West thinks by imposing draconian sanctions it will change the mood of the people, then it is right but exactly in the opposite direction, instead of the critical and quite often satiric attitude towards the authorities. In fact, they are consolidating and supporting it. A new world is being born and Russia with all her faults and problems is the midwife and godmother. I will stop here but I have lot more to say. Please let us continue with the dialogue
With affection and respect
HCE
Dear Bruce,
Before writing on my observations on religious hostilities, allow me to make some notes on what the Ukraine fascist and ultra-national ideology is based on and where it comes from. I will not go too far back in history but pick it up after WW2.
Nazi collaborators and their role:
The Ukrainian government after the disintegration of the Soviet Union till today, with V. Zelensky have tried their best to whitewash and portray these collaborators as heroes and founders of the Ukraine State. I have chosen to describe Stepan Bandera, who probably is the most popular among the fascists who march with his portrait. Kindly find below my translation from Russian about Bandera. I have taken extracts from an article and what seemed to me important that would provide an idea of the basis for fascism.
Bandera Stepan Andreevich was a leader and organizer of the Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine and considered a terrorist. He was a member of the Ukrainian military organization (from 1928) and the Organization of the Ukraine nationalists (OUN) from 1929, and organizer of a series of terrorist acts. Bandera was condemned by the Polish authorities to life in prison and his memory has not been rehabilitated till now. He was considered a criminal.
Stepan Bandera and his supporters sought “independence” through violence, revolution, and genocide. The theoretical activity of the Bandera supporters started in Poland, their most notorious terror cases was the killing of government personalities Soviet Cousul Andre Mailov in 1933. In 1934 he participated in the organization in the killing of the Polish minister of interior Bronislav Peratski and the director of the Ukraine academic gymnasium Ivan Babi. He organized an explosion in the offices of the “Pratsia” newspaper.
In the summer of 1934, polish authorities arrested Bandera. On January 13, 1936, Stepan Bandera and his accomplices were sentenced to death for the murder of Peratski. Then the death penalty was changed to life in prison, which he spent till 1939 in Polish prisons. After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 he was freed.
During the German occupation, Bandera and his supporters cooperated with Hitler’s Germany and they terrorized the population. Poles and Jews were killed most of all. Immediately after the capture of Lvov the Bander, supporters jointly carried out mass pogroms.
In our days in Ukraine one of the dates that is commemorated as the “liberation movement for the independence of Ukraine” is 30 June 1941, when the Bandera supporters in Lvov declared the restoration of the Ukrainian state. In the “Act of the declaration of the Ukraine state”, there was the following point:
“The newly created Ukraine state will closely cooperate with the great National –Socialist Germany under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, who is creating a new order in Europe the world and helps Ukraine to free itself from the Moscow occupation”
After the war, Stepan Bandera lived in Munich and worked for the British security services. A Soviet agent executed him in 1959.
The Ukraine authorities and V. Zelensky personally make a hero out of Bandera. Monuments are erected and marches take place in his honor in which the participants call for the killing of Russians. The original text of the link above contains pictures of the fascists in Ukraine during their marches, as well as a document in Ukrainian and its Russian translation, where Bandera and his supporters glorify Hitler and fawn over the Nazis, I recommend taking a look at it.
This is the ideology of a minority that has managed, with the financing and support of the West, to create an atmosphere of hate and terror, Russophobia, and xenophobia. The forces that could have stood up to them were either banned (the communists), or brainwashed and tempted by the dream of EU and NATO.
Fascist and nationalistic ideology in Ukraine is not a phenomenon that is purely local. it is part of the populist ultra-right ideas that have swept Europe and the US. These include the appearance of fascist movements that rode on the wave of capitalist austerity instability, lack of steady employment, to scapegoating refugees for the lack of capitalist prosperity.
Place of Religion: Ukraine Greek Orthodox vs Ukraine Greek Catholic Church
There is another card that has been played by the west, the card of religion. Little has been said in the western media about this, but the fact that religion started to play a big role in the life of the people of the countries who were living in what was the Soviet Union is undeniable. People of various classes and occupations became religious, some even fanatics.
Very briefly, historically in Ukraine there were two main religious tendencies. Ukraine Greek Orthodox in the East and Ukraine Greek Catholic in the West. Relations are not the best. The Ukraine Greek Catholic Church actively cooperated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine. Moreover, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Greek Orthodox Church in Ukraine from being part of the Moscow Patriarchy split into different parts mainly along nationalistic lines. This hatred was built not only on theological differences, but on property, including churches and land.
Economic self-sufficiency
I do not know whether you have heard Sergei Lavrov’s interview. There were the following words that made an impression on me:
“As for our economic problems, we will deal with them. We have coped with difficulties at all stages of our history when these difficulties arose. But this time, I assure you, we will get out of this crisis with a completely healthy psychology and a healthy consciousness. We will have no illusions about the reliability of the west as a partner. We will not have any illusions that the West, when it talks about its values, does not really believe in its promises and spells, and we will have no illusions that the West is capable of betrayal at any moment. It will betray anyone and betray its own values.” TASS reports Lavrov’s words. (My translation)
Quote — “The US will likely end up supplying Ukraine with Switchblade loitering munitions. The system poses a real threat. Nevertheless, the Russian military will likely use the tactics we saw in Syria to neutralize this threat.” (Southfront)
And, well, it is tax time, and these beasts of a nation — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, MSM — they rally around the military offensive murdering complex for, well, billions thrown at the Nazi regime of Ukraine. And I have to pay more taxes on my subpar wages? Give me a few of those drones, please! Billions of dollars thrown at the most corrupt and evil of them all (well, there are many evil ones, so see this as hyperbole). One contract with this outfit, AeroVironment. Looking into that company, I find its current president to be an interesting man:
Wikipedia — Nawabi is an Afghan sub clan mega Barakzai the majority of this clan played an important role during the Barakzai dynasty – such as Ismail Khan Nawabi.
The name Nawabi is borrowed from the Arabic, being the honorific plural of Naib or “deputy”. The name Nawab is mostly used among South Asians. In Bengal it is pronounced Nowab. The English adjective nawabi (from the Urdu word nawwābī) describes anything associated with a nawab.
He says AeroVironment is a great place to work because: “There is no place like AeroVironment where a group of honorable, smart, and hardworking people can make such a big and positive impact on our lives and society. I am excited and honored to lead such a team in order to help all of our 3 stakeholders Proceed with Certainty.”
Wahid Nawabi
Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer
Yes, the face of the military murdering complex is a smile, a wink, and even a diversity statement validation.
As President and Chief Executive Officer at AEROVIRONMENT INC, Wahid Nawabi made $2,524,773 in total compensation. Of this total $632,319 was received as a salary, $535,513 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $1,333,024 was awarded as stock and $23,917 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year. President and Chief Executive Officer. AEROVIRONMENT INC
So, the wink and a nod, all those stock options, all of that base pay, all of it, all predicated on, hmm, contracts. Yes, US GI Joe fed contracts. And, well, a contract is a contract, whether Mario Puzo is writing about it, or if one of the slick female heads of the war complex companies is drafting and signing it. This is one company, which I have previously discussed in general and specifically is really not just one in Santa’s Serial Murder workshops, but one represents dozens of companies (contracted) relying on those contracts for these drones with payloads: wires, optics, diodes, motherboards, paint, metal, gears, etc. Kamikaze drones, what a lovely thing to be proud of, and this company is just one of thousands that makes money off of blood.
The officials told the outlet that the White House is currently considering supplying Ukraine with Switchblades, as part of a new package of military aid. However, they noted that no decisions on the matter have been made, yet.
There are two available variants of the loitering munition, the Switchblade 300 and the 600. The 300 was designed to target personnel and unarmored vehicles. It has a range of 10 kilometers and an endurance of 10 minutes. The larger 600 was designed to destroy armored vehicles, like battle tanks. This version has a range of 80 kilometers and an endurance of up to 20 minutes. (source)
Please, kind reader, look at these people — the website of their team: Aerovironment. For me, they are scary people, for sure, in that they are the paper-pushers and state college grads from engineering programs; they are the marketers, the CPAs and the HR folk. These are what I have faced my entire life teaching — people who have no reservation about making money selling drugs that kill (Big Pharma) or booze that kills or anything that kills, both human or environment. Look at their biographies on the “About Us” page above. This is the banality of evil, and I am afraid, that evil is much much deeper engrained than Hannah Arendt could have conjured up because there is no “great war,” no great global war against Nazis and fascists, as in WWII. It’s all transactional, money for blood, weapons ‘r us!
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958
I’m not sure she was thinking of the pure structural/sanctions-led/financial tyranny of capitalism, that soft tyranny of western consumerism, the constant inverted tyranny in a world where most First World folk eat, drink, sleep oil. A world that is run by business men and business women, under the umbrella of the Deep State and government thugs. I do not think she was in the know around how pernicious the marketing of lies and evil doing was under the guidance of a fellow Jew, Edward (Freud) Bernays. But she was onto something, for sure:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
You see, the totalitarianism is in the marketing of these spoils of war, and the war minders, and the war industry. Look at this company’s founder, Paul MacCready. Check him out on Wikipedia — Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “do more with less.”
In so many ways, MacCready represents the best and the brightest of his generation, the hope for mankind, the genius of the American System producing tools of war, tools of profit. He represents the undying American work ethic, with only the heavens (err, he said sky, as he was an avowed atheist) as his limit.
That is it, really — the biography of a military industrial complex tool of death, all started in the twinkle of a 15-year-old MacCready’s eye when he was designing planes and gliders in 1940. Now? Every sort of munition and payload delivered in the fuselages of those toys. Heck, why not drone-carrying bugs injected or engineered with viruses?
CNBC 3/16/2022: “Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Alibaba, AeroVironment, Boeing and more”. Again, success at the start of the trading and the end of the day bell on Wall Street! Get US taxpayer contract in the millions, and see you stock rise rise rise like sour dough bread,
Oh, you can pull a million images and a million news briefs from the Internet to illustrate the powerful and their stupidity and their absolute disdain for the rest of us.
She laughs when asked about refugees, this time, from Ukraine. She is laughing about being in either the west or east flank in Poland. She doesn’t know for sure. This is the blunt end of a hammer. They all may be woke and full of civet-feces coffee and gourmet bacon-laced canopies, but they are still blunt ends of the stick. Look, she’s a multimillionaire, so they have a million and one excuses to go with their greenbacks. (Here, one source, RT, banned, on her “gaffs”!)
They all are — those old policy makers, those politicians, those diplomats — mulimillionaires. They are the blunt end of the protection rackets for the super rich and billionaire class. However, even multimillionaires can, with a pronouncement, a flip of the hand, jigger of the computer mouse, they can say, “We deem all Russian things off limits.” Imagine the power, and then those countries like China, so-called all powerful, accepting some of the sanctions, for now. USA is one tough hombre.
This is serious stuff — read Whitney’s, “Twice in a Century: Russia Faces a War of Annihilation”!
So, then, the $5.5 a gallon for gasoline. Again, the multimillionaires, the Greta “I Am Aspergers” Thornberg’s, they can all applaud the hurt locker their leaders are unleashing on the common folk (Russians), and we know Greta’s parents are, well, they are Swedish millionaires (with a small “m”). Actors! Whew!
Wheat prices, doubling? Electricity, doubling? Food shortages and food tripling? That is, doubling and tripling of the price of these items. When you are a multimillionaire like Biden or Harris, Nuland or Kagen (even DoD Generals are millionaires), and when your pay is a taxpayer-dredged paycheck, and when you have an all-expenses-paid suite of benefits, and when you have insider trader information, and when you have full-spectrum health care, and when you have accountants, CPAs, financial advisors in the backrooms assisting you, this doubling of foodstuffs, this dollar or two/three more for a gallon of gasoline, well, that’s a laughing matter. . . for THEM. I’ve heard many a multimillionaire Mainstream Media Press Hoaxes telling you and telling me and telling all those home health workers and slave wage workers that we have to suck it up, that is, this is the small small price to pay in order to liberate (send billions in terrorist-headed small and large arms) Ukraine for capitalism, well, they call it PayDay Democracy with a big “d” for Dollar. When you are making these funny jokes and imbecilic comments, as we hear from Harris on down the line of Georgetown-Harvard-Stanford-Yale grads, and yet there still will be no pitchforks and gallows for you, and, alas, that small price to pay for mainstreet USA and pensioner USA, well, well, they can still have a very fine and fun life in their multimillionaire dollar homes . . . . It is the sacrifice they take, letting us know, we should sacrifice, and yet we will consume their junk, gobble up their celebrity feces, wait with bated breath for their words and deeds to be announced on MDM, as they continue with their fun lives, no matter if the gallon goes to $5 or $7 or $10 a gallon.
But, then, think of granny. Think of her meds going up-up-up! The foodstuffs going up-up-up. And if she has a leak under her sink, or if she has a puddle of mud outside the door along the pathway out gushing into her basement . . . and if she has a car that needs some new used tires and spark plugs . . . and if she needs to visit friends once in a while one-way in that vehicle, say, 120 miles one way (she lives in a rural abode) . . . and if she has a cat that needs teeth pulled . . . and if she dares thinks about seeing an ailing sister across the country via a plane, oh, well, let’s laugh at the pain she is now under. You know how much a plane ticket is? That’s the laughing break-point for granny. From podunk town Oregon to Virginia, or Florida: do the math on what a Roundtrip ticket sets granny back. But then these left/right politicians and woke/woodern corporate leaders can say, “Suck it up. It’s only $5 a gallon for gas. Look what those blonde and blue eyed ones in the Ukraine are suffering. Suck it up for a Ukraine refugee” (recall: eat all those spuds and green beans cuz a kid in China is starving . . . .!)
Let’s have a great laughing circle jerk as sanctions kill, and lies and mass incompetence murder people, and massive war profiteering wounds both humanity and townships, and where massive Covid-19 profiteering creates lingering death and long-term mental instability. As massive stock trading on those futures and those offensive weapons companies grow grow grow, while the Kamala Harrises of the world, really, get into the cackling mood on any number of topics for which she knows nothing, we are the sufferers. All those multimillionaire laughing hyenas, and I see Hillary and Bill are at it again with their continuing criminal enterprise, the Clinton Foundation!
Let’s hear about Elon Musk’s latest creepy surrogate childbirth. Let’s hear about this $1 million here and that $20 million there shoved down some redneck university football coach’s mouth while the college students are under another load of debt.
Let’s laugh it all off, the reality of this war, or that incursion, this sanction/that sanction, or that weaponized economic movement toward more of the gilded laughing class, that Hyena Laughing Multimillionaire Chorus. We can have Stephen Colbert help us laugh. Where’s Jon Leibowitz Stewart and Sean Penn when we need them? We need their multimillionaire advice, ASAP, and their laughs! “It’s only a few bucks more for a gallon of gas . . . deal with it,” old Colbert chortled.
Imagine, all those months and years The Putin warned against all that EU-Nato-UK-USA aggressive shit coming to Russia’s borders. All those times he petitioned, nyet, nyet, nyet!
Shifting now to make an analogy — Now, interestingly, I have been involved in a SWAT killing, that is, one of our clients — homeless veteran — had a suicidal moment alone, in his truck, with a handgun. Roads cordoned off. Everything around the Portland Salvation Army’s facility lock-downed. News at Six and Headlines at Ten there. Massive police armed presence. Armored trucks and gun turret vehicle, and then, of course, all guns drawn and three nifty SEAL trained snipers.
They gave him two and a half hours to get his shit together, and then, bam, 13 shots, seven to the body. He was handcuffed and lived. He was by himself. Suicide Not By Cops.
Another two-hour standoff. And, then, bullets to the head. Imagine that. I have been around cops most of my life, and I was a city and rural reporter, newspapers, that is, and covered the cop beats — local, feds, military, county. I have interviewed FBI, and I have been in some K9 units for both city and military cops. The bottom line is — there is absolutely a one in a million chance someone who threatens cops in a standoff in his car yelling “bomb, bomb, bomb” has a bomb. Absolutely Zero chance, really. Lots of TV shows and Netflix series, aside.
So, Putin gives the world, the EU, the UK-USA-Five Eyes, Nato, what, a month, a year, several years, eight years warning about needing those missiles and other weapons off of Ukraine’s soil?
Nothing like the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there shall be no military or no nothing allowed in the Western Hemisphere, err, in the US’s Neighborhood; i.e., backyard!
That old soft shoe — survival of the fittest or most riches or best placed bribes. That loving spoonful, here, all those pensioners, all those with multiple chronic illnesses, all those people in housing that is falling apart, all those loans hobbling folk. Choices between medications, or food. This is the country, man, USA, this is it for the epitome of exceptionalism.
Those $57 billion in loans the other laughing hyena, Zelensky the Comic, that’s what he wants forgiven. Laughing, while demanding more weaponry, more billions. That’s the jig is up game when you are a testing lab (country) for GMOs, drugs, and, well, bioweapons.
It’s funny stuff, the billions he has in Costa Rica (maybe) and the mansion in Florida ($28 million valued). These are laughing matters, and VP Harris is just one in a long line of laughers in the multimillionaire category; or for those in the billionaire’s “mile high screw the hundreds of millions of us club,” the laughing is incredible, cowboy hats and all!
Again, granny and the kiddos. When I was working as a reporter in Southern Arizona, I did a couple of pieces on the O’Malley Clan — a group of people, many in the same family, who would take their panel trucks and pick-up trucks and go to trailer parks and low income housing tracts and get old people to pay for roofing, for gutter work, for all sorts of things that the O’Malley Clan said needed fixing. Then, up on the roof, and a five gallon white can of paint later, leaky roof fixed. A cool $800 cash for a $75 five gallon of roof sealant. This is the style of the American who sees PT Barnum as a god, that sucker born every second, man oh man, that god.
Of course, States Attorney General had some squads trying to break up those O’Malley rings, but imagine, now 42 years later, and the amount of pure scam, pure fraud, pure bilking, pure rip-off, pure lying and chronic cheating that have cascaded into the American culture.
The amount of multiple millions stolen from granny and from kiddo is out the roof, out of the sky. And those Laughing Politicians and All Those Amazing Celebrities, all of them, just rah-rahing the sanctions, the price of oil going up up up, all the strain and weathering on common people who can’t afford what’s going on in their Circle Jerks.
The blame is on capitalism, on predatory and casino capitalism. The Gilded Agers, the deep state, all those Eichmann’s making money with the blood of granny and kiddo on their hands.
The laughing all the way to their offshore banks — and then, well, DeltaCron will be coming to a neighborhood around Halloween.
Those bioweapons, man:
Every day, every moment of these scams, these false flags, this depravity of Empire USA, all of those things, shit, it is, as McGovern and Mearsheimer and Matlock say, this is not a done deal, MSM.
Those chickens have come home to roost and roost and crap and crap:
A revealing Portside article of Feb. 14 describes how 36 American states either have or are seeking to pass laws that censor the teaching of both local and national history so as to tell a traditional, Eurocentric story. This effort seeks to deny the demonstrable facts about the role racism has played in shaping social and economic development since the nation’s inception. Against this trend, 17 U.S. states have moved to officially expand their history and social studies curriculum to make it more racially and class inclusive.
We should state clearly that the teaching of such a culturally approved official history has always been pursued in the United States, and is indeed not just an American tactic. It is a ubiquitous practice in much of the world. As public education evolved in the American colonies during the 19th century, it had specific goals: (1) to make the young as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty. If in this effort there was any reference to or concern for “the truth,” it was allegedly to be represented by the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. — Lawrence Davidson
[ The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0) ]
But, again, it’s the old lady down the lane. The man and child living in their RV, and it is the person just trying to live out a life with few things having no one willing to come out and saw up the downed tree and patch the hole in the side of the house. Little homes with roof bids at $20,000!
Those lovely places, Israel, now Ukraine, where money is stuffed, again, down those Hyenas’ mouths while the land here is more and more susceptible to waves, winds, rising oceans, inundation.
Pacific Northwest coastal communities are at risk from earthquakes, including “The Really Big One”, tsunamis, sea level rise, landslides, erosion, and increased precipitation. Stretching from Cape Mendocino, California through Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, Canada, these Cascadia communities are calling for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience to these coastal hazards. (Event, March 16)
Yet, here we are, the war, the Putin, after how many years stating that EU-UK-USA-Five Eyes-Nato to stand down.
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened. (Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.)
Wow! A picture says a million words from 100 million misinformed people:
Max Blumenthal on Twitter: “Larry Summers – who presided over the demolition and plundering of Russia’s economy in the 1990’s and pushed policies that led to the US financial crash – says Americans need to suffer higher gas & food prices and inflation ‘as the price of fighting tyranny.’”
A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations.
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.
In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.
“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” (source)
This seems like the poster plastered around town, no, or is Word Press now in the employ of the censors? Maybe we can put a question mark behind, “8 Real Threats to Humanity?” Does that work better?
The Russian military has used cluster bombs in at least two attacks on Ukraine, and likely a third, since its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, according to media and social media reports, and human rights groups. The strikes have resulted in civilian deaths. Their use in these instances may ultimately qualify as a war crime, given the indiscriminate nature of the explosives, as well as the reasonable expectation that they could fail to detonate immediately, causing risks to civilians for years.
A Russian strike killed four people and injured 10 in an attack on a hospital in Vuhledar, in the Donetsk region, according to Human Right Watch. Russian forces struck Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with multiple rounds of cluster munitions strikes, according to weapons experts who spoke with Reuters. And a preschool in Okhtyrka, in Sumy Oblast, was hit by cluster bombs suspected to have been deployed by Russian forces, killing three civilians, according to Amnesty International. Open-source intelligence organization Bellingcat has identified other uses of cluster munitions in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though it’s not clear whether those strikes resulted in any casualties.
Cluster munitions are a category of weapon that covers any delivery system that opens in midair to scatter tens or hundreds of “bomblets” that rain down over a dispersed area. They can be dropped from bombers or fired from artillery, and are a controversial weapon even by the standards of modern warfare. The bomblets — which are similar to landmines — are not precise and do not discriminate between soldiers and civilians, by definition. In many cases, the smaller bombs fail to explode on impact, leaving civilians at risk for years to come.
Since 2010, 110 countries have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans their use, while another 13 are signatories that haven’t ratified it yet. Crucially, the United States, Russia and China have not joined in the ban. Neither has Ukraine, nor U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, which has used U.S.-made cluster munitions in its war on Yemen as recently as 2016. The United States military is not believed to have used cluster bombs since a strike in Yemen in 2009, according to Human Rights Watch, which monitors the use of the weapons closely.
Some estimates have found that as many as 85 percent of casualties from cluster bombs since the treaty’s enactment have been civilians. “Evidence from Afghanistan, Laos, Lebanon, Iraq, Serbia, and other affected states’ cluster munitions revealed that there was no responsible way to use cluster munitions due to their inherently indiscriminate nature,” writes Erin Hunt, program manager at Mines Action Canada. In general, the “laws of war” require militaries to follow several key requirements: to distinguish between civilians and combatants, to attack only military targets and to make the risk to civilians “proportional” to the military objective. As a result, even analysts who reject a more vehement critique of militarism and war are still able to unite in opposition to cluster bombs, arguing that their use in general, and their apparent recent use by Russia, don’t meet those requirements.
Russia is now more than a week into its invasion of Ukraine, a war of aggression that has drawn widespread condemnation across the world and isolated the country diplomatically and economically. Russia’s currency, the ruble, plummeted on the news that the United States would impose sanctions on the country’s Central Bank, a first for a G20 member nation.
Russia’s push toward Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, has advanced slower than many military experts initially predicted. Early reporting has indicated that the Ukrainian military and volunteer forces have held up significantly better than expected, and Russia’s apparent belief in a swift tactical victory seems to have been misplaced, at least for the moment. Despite the Ukrainians’ ability to repel the early attacks, most still believe that if Russia is committed to taking the capital, it’s just a matter of time. On Monday, the Russian military unleashed “multiple-launch rocket fire against residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, killing at least 10 civilians,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Russia’s use of cluster munitions in Kharkiv could be a signal of what’s to come, especially if its military continues to face stiffer opposition than expected. Experts worry that Russia may enter a new phase of the invasion, one specifically designed to terrorize and demoralize Ukrainian civilians. Some U.S. officials have claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is growing “increasingly frustrated” with the campaign, and may order an escalation of the violence.
Of particular concern is that Putin may pursue similar tactics to those his military used in defense of their close ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, following that country’s revolution during the Arab uprisings. Both Russia and the Syrian government deployed cluster munitions widely, in addition to subjecting Syrian civilians to chemical attacks and prolonged sieges of heavily populated cities.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which went into effect in 2010 under the authority of the United Nations, has had some success in stigmatizing the use of the weapons. Signatories to the convention have also taken steps to destroy their existing stockpiles, a major step towards lessening their use.
Still, the weapons have continued to be used. Beyond Syria and Yemen, cluster munitions have been used in Ukraine by Russian-backed militants, as well as in Cambodia, Sudan and South Sudan. Russia and Georgia also each used the weapons in their conflict in 2008, which some now see as Putin’s template for Ukraine.
The U.S.’s approach to cluster munitions has been entirely inadequate, even as the government and military have limited their use and sale in recent years. Prior to the 2009 U.S. strike in Yemen, which killed 41 civilians, the last U.S. use of the weapons was in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2008, the outgoing George W. Bush administration, facing international pressure due in large part to the emerging cluster weapons ban, issued a new policy prohibiting the U.S. military from using cluster munitions that failed to explode at a rate greater than 1 percent by 2018. That decision resulted “in essence, [in] banning all but a tiny fraction of the existing arsenal,” according to Mary Wareham, arms division advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. In 2017, however, then-President Donald Trump overrode that policy, replacing it with the much looser conditions under which the weapons could be used. Trump allowed commanders to deploy the existing stockpiles “until sufficient quantities” of “enhanced and more reliable” bombs could be researched and developed. President Joe Biden has left that policy in place, despite heavy criticism from the human rights community.
According to the Cluster Munition Monitor, which tracks the use of the weapons, the United States no longer produces cluster bombs, though China and Russia are developing new generations of the weapons. Although the consensus in the human rights community is that the weapons are impossible to use in accordance with the laws of war, are inherently immoral and do not create a battlefield advantage to justify their myriad drawbacks, that perspective is not shared by some in the U.S. military, who have continued to argue for their use to slow or disrupt large-scale “enemy” movements by militaries across a wide space.
But the reality is that when cluster bombs have been used, in practice, they are used against civilians. They kill indiscriminately. And when they fail to explode in the heat of battle, they kill civilians years later.
Russia’s use of the weapons is horrific, unjustifiable and inexcusable. The United States can and should do more to stigmatize and lessen the global use of cluster munitions, first and foremost by revoking Trump’s 2017 policy and then by joining the treaty that bans their use.
While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily and has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia amounting to what some have called “economic warfare.” We look at Biden’s response with Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, who is also Ukrainian American. He says the U.S. should continue to exhaust all diplomatic avenues in order to stop violence in Ukraine. Duss also details the U.S. role in setting the stage for Putin’s oligarchical government and says the U.S. must not use “Ukrainians as a tool for our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, we turn now to look at how the Biden administration is responding to the crisis. Biden has repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion and opposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia in what some have described as a form of “economic warfare.” While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily. CNN is reporting the U.S. has recently delivered hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine for the first time. President Biden took questions outside the White House Wednesday.
REPORTER 1: Do you support permanent U.S. military presence in Poland and other Eastern European countries now, after what’s happening in Ukraine?
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: We’ve always been there. We’ve always been in all the NATO countries.
REPORTER 1: I’m talking about permanent bases.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: No, that’s a decision for NATO to make.
REPORTER 2: Do you think that —
REPORTER 3: Mr. President, what did you mean when you said —
REPORTER 4: Will you consider getting rid of vaccine mandates?
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: I’m sorry.
REPORTER 5: Mr. President, are you considering banning Russian oil imports?
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Nothing is off the table.
AMYGOODMAN: We’re joined now by Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Senator Bernie Sanders. He’s also a Ukrainian American. His father was born in Germany in a displaced persons camp after World War II after his family fled Ukraine.
Matt Duss, welcome to Democracy Now! Can respond, first of all, just to the overall situation, then particularly to the U.S. response and what needs to be done?
MATTDUSS: Well, I mean, I think your previous guests described the horrifying situation in Ukraine right now, which is just — we’ve just passed over a week of this Russian invasion. We’re seeing more shelling of Ukrainian cities. And this is from — you know, Putin justified this invasion claiming that he was there to liberate Russians and Ukrainians from a fascist government. We don’t need to tick through all the various justifications he has given, but I think Ukrainians, obviously, knew that was false, but I think Russian soldiers themselves now should be questioning whether that’s false.
As for the U.S. response, I think we’ve seen, you know, even in the months and certainly the weeks leading up to the invasion, a very energetic diplomatic response from the United States to work with allies in Europe, NATO allies, but not only NATO allies, with allies in Asia, to prepare a sanctions response. I think that sanctions response has been extremely aggressive. It’s become not just sanctions on Putin and his government and oligarchs around Putin, but over the week we saw serious sanctions cutting off a number of banks from the SWIFT system, as your previous guest mentioned, but also effectively blocking sanctions on the central bank of Russia. So, these are very, very serious measures, and I think we’ll have to watch now how Putin decides to respond.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, Matt, as you know, many have called for more — many in Ukraine have called for, minimally, more punitive sanctions, including an embargo on oil and gas exports. Europe is, of course, dependent for most of its gas and oil — 40 and 30%, respectively — from Russia. And Russia’s revenues, of course, also come from the sale of these oil and gas reserves. Could you talk about whether you think that’s likely, and, even if these sanctions are imposed, whether that is likely to deter Russia?
MATTDUSS: Right. No, I think there are two things here. One, that is it likely? And I want to say it’s very possible, although that is something that is going to hit European countries much, much harder, and, frankly, it’s going to hit the United States much harder. And, you know, it’s going to raise the price of gas. It’s going to raise the price of goods. That’s certainly not an argument against it. I mean, I think if we are serious about imposing costs on the Russian government and on Vladimir Putin, that is, as President Biden said in the press remarks that you just played, everything is on the table. I think it also gets at the importance, ultimately — and this is something my boss, Senator Sanders, has talked about — to use this moment to shift more aggressively to green energy and deny these authoritarian regimes, not just Putin but a broader set of petrostates, the revenues they require to rule.
But getting to the second point: How does this impact Putin’s calculation, the Russian government’s calculation? That is a real — you know, that’s a question I have, as well. I think Putin has, unfortunately, laid out a number of very, very expansive goals and has not really left himself — I mean, it’s hard to see how he would climb down from the very expansive agenda he’s laid out. Many of your listeners are probably aware of the speech that he gave last week on the eve of the invasion, where he kind of laid out his theory that Ukraine is not a real country and this is part of the kind of Russian imperium, as he defines it. You know, and he would not be the first leader to walk back from some very wild — you know, this kind of wild agenda. But as of right now, it’s unclear to me how he might do that.
And we should also be very mindful of the impact that these sanctions are going to make, not just on the regime but on Russian working people themselves. This is, I think, a broader concern that progressives have about these kinds of sanctions tools, because if the theory of the case is that you will put pressure on the people who will, in turn, put pressure on their rulers, it’s not quite clear how exactly that works when you’re dealing with governments that are simply not responsive to the will of their people, as is the case in Russia.
AMYGOODMAN: Matt, I wanted to ask you about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments on MSNBC Monday, talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
HILLARYCLINTON: Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. And although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisers to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn’t end well for the Russians. There were other unintended consequences, as we know. But the fact is that a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. … I think that is the model that people are now looking toward.
AMYGOODMAN: “Unintended consequences,” Matt Duss?
MATTDUSS: Yeah.
AMYGOODMAN: Again, that’s the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
MATTDUSS: Yeah, I would just respond to that by saying it didn’t end well for the Russians; it really didn’t end well for anyone, least of all the people of Afghanistan themselves. So, I certainly understand this may — you know, this invasion may backfire, ultimately, on Putin and on the Russian government, but I think we should not see this in terms simply of using the Ukrainians as a tool of our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia. I think the goal needs to be to end this fighting as quickly as we possibly can, to use every diplomatic lever we can to end this fighting. I think that should be our focus.
AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to quickly ask you about oligarchs. You referred to the Russian oligarchs. But you talk about the oligarchs on both sides.
MATTDUSS: Mm-hmm, yeah, that’s right. I mean, what is an oligarch? It’s a very wealthy and politically influential person, just in its broadest definition. Certainly, there is a set of oligarchs that have a lot of influence in Russia. And let’s understand, one of the reasons why these oligarchs do have such power and wealth and influence is in large part because of the kind of neoliberal shock therapy that was applied to Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, backed often by U.S. economists, who effectively auctioned off — who urged Russia to auction off the people’s property, and it was gathered up by these oligarchs for their own wealth. And Putin — you know, this led to such an economic collapse and economic hardship that this, in turn, enabled the rise of a strongman like Putin, who gathered the oligarchs under his own control.
And this is certainly not the first time the United States has run this scam. Let’s understand, this kind of shock therapy has been applied in a number of countries around the world and has produced similar authoritarian outcomes. Now, having said that, I think we also have — you know, in our political system, while it is certainly not the same as Russia’s, to say the least, we have a problem here of large concentrations of wealth and the political influence that that can buy in our system.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Matt, I’d like to conclude by asking you about what you imagine the trajectory of this conflict might be. I mean, what Hillary Clinton said about unintended consequences and, of course, also about the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan by — the Soviets at the time in Afghanistan is wrong. There are people who are expecting that this may turn out the same way, because even though the Americans and the Europeans have ruled out a no-fly zone, they are flooding Ukraine with weapons. And Russia, Putin doesn’t show any indication of backing down, because, as you pointed out, it’s not clear how he would save face or, indeed, how at this point the Russians can extract themselves. What do you think a resolution would look like? And do you think it’s likely?
MATTDUSS: Yeah, well, hopefully — I mean, the goal here, whether one agrees with it or not, I would say that the Biden administration’s approach here has been fairly consistent for some time, which is to make clear to Putin that this invasion will be much more costly than he might have imagined. And I certainly think that Putin is seeing that right now, both in terms of the strength and the breadth of the sanctions that have been applied on Russia, with the U.S. working with its allies around the world, but also in terms of the Ukrainian resistance. I think some of the casualties that you read out earlier, these are pretty remarkable. I think there are some estimates that put the number of Russian troops killed at around 7,000. We should be cautious about those numbers right now. But let’s just understand, 7,000 would be as many troops as the U.S. lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost combined, in nearly 20 years.
So, in terms — so, the logic here is, you know, understanding that the Ukrainians themselves are resisting the Russian invasion. I think they have a right to do so, certainly. I think the goal should continue to be, or our focus should continue to be: What are the steps that end this fighting quickest, that continue to support diplomacy? Yes, the Ukrainians are agreeing to meet once again with the Russians, as you noted, on the Belarus border to find some diplomatic resolution here that ends the fighting. But, to be very honest, as I said earlier, given the aims that Putin has laid out, it’s unclear to me if he is ready to take that offramp. So, for the time being, unfortunately — and it’s enormously painful to say this — but it’s hard for me to see how this stops anytime soon.
AMYGOODMAN: Matt Duss, we want to thank you so much for being with us, foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Matt Duss is a Ukrainian American.
Coming up, could Russia’s war in Ukraine spark a nuclear catastrophe? Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned if a Third World War is to take place, it’ll be nuclear. Stay with us.
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AMYGOODMAN: “Gonna Be an Engineer” by Peggy Seeger. It is Women’s History Month.
As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.
For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.
On that same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced, in front of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, that his country “has agreed with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to develop partnerships in a range of areas, including stepping up military collaboration,” Russia Today reported.
The timing of this agreement was hardly coincidental, of course. The country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov did not hesitate to link the move to the brewing Russia- NATO conflict. Russia’s strategy in South America could potentially be “involving the Russian Navy,” if the US continues to ‘provoke’ Russia. According to Ryabkov, this is Russia’s version of the “American style (of having) several options for its foreign and military policy”.
Now that the Russians are not hiding the motives behind their military engagement in South America, going as far as considering the option of sending troops to the region, Washington is being forced to seriously consider the new variable.
Though US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan denied that Russian military presence in South America was considered in recent security talks between both countries, he described the agreement between Russia and the three South American countries as unacceptable, vowing that the US would react “decisively” to such a scenario.
The truth is, that scenario has already played out in the past. When, in January 2019, the US increased its pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to concede power to the US-backed Juan Guaido, a coup seemed imminent. Chaos in the streets of Caracas, and other Venezuelan cities, mass electric outages, lack of basic food and supplies, all seemed part of an orchestrated attempt at subduing Venezuela, which has for years championed a political discourse that is based on independent and well-integrated South American countries.
For weeks, Washington continued to tighten the pressure valves imposing hundreds of sanction orders against Venezuelan entities, state-run companies and individuals. This led to Caracas’ decision to sever diplomatic ties with Washington. Ultimately, Moscow stepped in, sending in March 2019 two military planes full of troops and equipment to prevent any possible attempt at overthrowing Maduro. In the following months, Russian companies poured in to help Venezuela out of its devastating crisis, instigating another US-Russia conflict, where Washington resorted to its favorite weapon, sanctions, this time against Russian oil companies.
The reason that Russia is keen on maintaining a geostrategic presence in South America is due to the fact that a stronger Russian role in that region is coveted by several countries who are desperate to loosen Washington’s grip on their economies and political institutions.
Countries like Cuba, for example, have very little trust in the US. After having some of the decades-long sanctions lifted on Havana during the Obama administration in 2016, new sanctions were imposed during the Trump administration in 2021. That lack of trust in Washington’s political mood swings makes Cuba the perfect ally for Russia. The same logic applies to other South American countries.
It is still too early to speak with certainty about the future of Russia’s military presence in South America. What is clear, though, is the fact that Russia will continue to build on its geostrategic presence in South America, which is also strengthened by the greater economic integration between China and most South American countries. Thanks to the dual US political and economic war on Moscow and Beijing, both countries have fortified their alliance like never before.
What options does this new reality leave Washington with? Not many, especially as Washington has, for years, failed to defeat Maduro in Venezuela or to sway Cuba and others to join the pro-American camp.
Much of the outcome, however, is also dependent on whether Moscow sees itself as part of a protracted geostrategic game in South America. So far, there is little evidence to suggest that Moscow is using South America as a temporary card to be exchanged, when the time comes, for US and NATO concessions in Eastern Europe. Russia is clearly digging its heels, readying itself for the long haul.
For now, Moscow’s message to Washington is that Russia has plenty of options and that it is capable of responding to US pressure with equal or greater pressure. Indeed, if Ukraine is Russia’s red line, then South America – which has fallen under US influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – is the US’s own hemispheric red line.
As the plot thickens in Eastern Europe, Russia’s move in South America promises to add a new component that would make a win-lose scenario in favor of the US and NATO nearly impossible. An alternative outcome is for the US-led alliance to recognize the momentous changes on the world’s geopolitical map, and to simply learn to live with it.
US President Joe Biden accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of “wanting things he cannot get”. He was referring to Moscow’s security demands in Europe with regard to the US-led NATO military alliance.
Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.
Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against its western neighbor?
The American president and his administration have been warning that Moscow could order an assault on Ukraine “any day”. Well, days and indeed weeks go by and there is no outcome as touted.
Biden has also predicted that Putin doesn’t want to pursue diplomacy and that the Russian leader is driven to make war. Then a few days later, Putin hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in Moscow for marathon talks about resolving tensions.
Russia has repeatedly rubbished the invasion claims – that have largely emanated from the United States – as baseless hysteria. President Putin said this week he has no intention of escalating the tensions over Ukraine.
Moscow says that troops marshaled within Russia’s borders are not a threat to any neighboring state. The premise of American accusations about internal Russia’s military maneuvers is absurd. The precedent for interference it would establish is an affront to any nation’s sovereignty.
Even the Ukrainian government and security officials have pushed back against the American claims of an imminent Russian invasion.
Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of evidence and rationale, and in spite of a United Nations’ rebuke to desist from such inflammatory rhetoric, Washington keeps insisting on making its bogus predictions of Russian aggression.
So, when is this gargantuan hoax going to be held to account? This contemporary version of “crying wolf” should have political and legal consequences for the hoaxers.
Arguably, the Biden administration’s media campaign regarding Ukraine is a cynical exercise in manipulating public perception and manufacturing a crisis. Washington wants Russia to invade Ukraine in order to justify a US policy of division and conflict. American imperial ambitions for hegemony must rely on inciting tensions and ultimately conflict within Europe and towards Russia.
A specific objective for American global ambitions is to sabotage the strategic energy trade between the European Union and Russia. The problem for the US is that its charade of Russian aggression is simply not working. That’s because Moscow has no intention of starting a war with Ukraine or anyone else for that matter.
Sure enough, Russia has put down red lines regarding its national security. They include no further eastward expansion of the NATO bloc and the exclusion of offensive American strike weapons from near Russia’s borders. To most reasonable observers, those demands are hardly signs of “aggression”. In fact, they sound like a plausible basis for discussing a new security framework for Europe.
It seems that because the Biden administration can’t get what it wants – that is, a Russian invasion of Ukraine – it is hellbent on forcing or fabricating one.
While European leaders this week anxiously appeal for more diplomacy to avert confrontation, it is salient and damnable that Washington is desperately militarizing the tensions. Biden has ordered more troops to deploy in Eastern Europe provocatively under the pretext of “defending allies from Russian aggression”. His administration is airlifting plane-loads of lethal weaponry to Ukraine which has the seeming intended effect of undermining any chance of finding a peaceful settlement to the Ukrainian civil war that has been simmering since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.
It is significant that Washington and London are the most hawkish advocates for trying to impose harsher economic sanctions against Russia. This is while the United States and Britain are taking the lead in militarizing Eastern Europe and talking up belligerence towards Moscow. The combined Anglo-American stance appears to be one of goading Russia into an armed conflict which can then be used as a pretext for sabotaging Europe’s energy relations with Russia.
The danger is that the longer this American charade continues and the fantasy over Russia’s alleged invasion becomes more and more apparent, the risk increases of the US forcing a provocation for war. Perhaps not intended as a direct war, more likely as a proxy war using Ukraine.
President Biden and his administration, as well as the entire US corporate media, are at risk of being exposed in the eyes of the world as war hoaxers. Included in that list of criminal warmongers is Britain.
This portends Biden’s biggest foreign policy failure which, hard to believe, exceeds even the historic US defeat in Afghanistan.
As The Canary has extensivelyreported, the ongoing war in Yemen has seen Saudi-led forces commit atrocity after atrocity. But on 21 January, the Saudi dictatorship appears to have reached a new low in an attack that killed scores of civilians.
Given that Saudi Arabia is the US’s second biggest ally in the Middle East, its conduct in the war exposes the US’s brazen double standards when it comes to human rights. The war itself, meanwhile, stands as a testament to the US’s shameless use of proxy wars to further its own geostrategic interests.
Air strike ‘accidentally’ hits detention center
The air strikes launched by Saudi-led forces destroyed a detention facility in Yemen’s Saada province, which is currently controlled by the opposing Houthi-led forces. The death toll from the attack currently stands at over 90, with many, if not most, of that number comprising civilian casualties. Over a hundred more are believed to have been injured. The attack was denounced by, amongst others, United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres and Save the Children, which says that children are among the dead. The Saudi dictatorship denied it intentionally targeted the complex.
This latest attack adds to a long list of atrocities committed by the Saudi-led coalition forces, which also includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE), another Middle Eastern US ally. As The Canary has previouslyreported, this list includes dropping a bomb on a school bus killing 40 children and 11 adults, as well as a similar attack on a wedding that killed at least 20 civilians. In the case of the former, there is strong evidence that the US-made bomb was supplied to Saudi Arabia via a US arms deal.
Close ally of the US and UK governments in spite of dictatorial nature
Indeed, both the US and UK governments have been majorarms suppliers to Saudi Arabia. During his time in the White House, former president Donald Trump met with the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman to discuss the two countries’ ongoing partnership. He then vetoed a bill passed by Congress that would have limited US military aid to the oil rich Middle Eastern nation.
Now, under current US president Joe Biden, the country remains the US’s second staunchest ally in the Middle East after Israel. Indeed, late last year Biden committed to another whopping arms deal, this time worth $650m. This should come as no surprise given that Biden’s presidential campaign received over $500,000 from Raytheon, one of the major profiteers from the war in Yemen.
The Biden administration now seems to be scrambling to use the war as part of its broader foreign policy in the Middle East. In particular, it appears to be capitalizing on the fact that the opposing Houthi-led side in the conflict is allied with Iran.
Brazen hypocrisy when compared with treatment of Iran
As The Canary has reported, Washington has for years singled out Iran for sanctions and other forms of hostility. This includes the assassination (in violation of international law) of the major general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani. Again, this hostility is not because of concerns over human rights. Though Iran’s human rights record is far from stellar, Noam Chomsky points out that compared with Saudi Arabia, “Iran looks like a civil rights paradise”. Nor does it have anything to do with democratic credentials. After all, Saudi Arabia is not just a dictatorship but one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies.
Rather, hostility toward Iran is motivated by its lack of obedience to US economic and geostrategic interests. To take one example, whereas Saudi Arabia has been giving US multinational corporations preferential access to its oil reserves, Iran has been less obliging in this regard. Another reason is that the US seeks greater control over the Persian Gulf, a major area of importance for the oil industry that lies in part along Iran’s southern coast.
Willingness to compromise repaid with even further hostility
In spite of all this, Iran has been surprisingly willing to compromise with Washington. During the administration of former US president Barack Obama, for example, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA). Known colloquially as the ‘Iran nuclear deal’, the agreement set limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions.
The agreement was completely hypocritical given that the US has not just turned a blind eye to but actively enabled the only nuclear-armed state in the region, Israel. Indeed, the US itself holds the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. There’s even conflicting accounts about whether Iran’s nuclear program is even intended for developing nuclear weapons in the first place. The Iranian government says that it is exclusively for developing nuclear energy generation and currently allows the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor its nuclear program. Nonetheless, Iran voluntarily agreed to the terms in a move supported by most of the US’s major allies, including the UK.
In 2019, the Trump administration unilaterally pulled the US out of the treaty in a move that was condemned by Washington’s European allies, again including the UK. This meant the reimposition of sanctions including a withdrawal of import permits. These sanctions will, and indeed already have, caused great damage to Iran’s economy. And as is so often the case with sanctions, it’s largely the civilian population, and especially the most vulnerable people, who suffer the most rather than the ostensible targets in the government.
Instrumentalising war for self-serving ends
Now, the Biden administration looks poised to seize on the actions of the Iran-aligned Houthi side in the conflict for its own benefit. In recent weeks, Houthi forces have launched a series of successful countermeasures. The Associated Press (AP) reports that this has included “cross-border drone and ballistic-missile strikes”. In response to this, the AP says that “U.S. officials are studying financial measures targeting the Houthis and the group’s top figures”.
The Biden administration is currently in negotiations with the Iranian government to reestablish the JCPA. US officials earlier indicated that they hope to bring the talks to a conclusion in late January or early February. Just as this unofficial deadline looks like it will pass, Washington seemingly has stumbled upon a useful tool, in the form of the Yemen war, for strengthening its hand in the negotiations.
As Al-Monitorputs it, “The stepped-up US military support [for the Houthis in Yemen] is not just a sign of the US commitment to the UAE — it’s a signal to Iran”. Clearly, Washington is willing to shamelessly use proxy wars as a bargaining chip to strengthen its geostrategic interests in a broader global context.
A bipartisan consensus for coercive foreign policy
What makes all of this even more disconcerting is the fact that the current US president belongs to the purportedly more progressive of the US’s two major parties. But as The Canary has arguedbefore on manyoccasions, the reality is that when it comes to administering the US’s empire and maintaining its coercive foreign policy, there is essentially a bipartisan consensus in Congress, with the leadership of both parties largely acting in lockstep.
In the same vein, ignoring and even enabling shocking human rights violations on the part of US allies largely enjoys bipartisan support. As this latest atrocity in Yemen attests to, there is evidently no depth to which Washington won’t sink in its hypocritical pandering to loyal allies or its cynical seizing upon proxy wars to further victimize its enemies.
On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibility
Joe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.
The president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode.
President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.
Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten critical foreign policy issues:
Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the United States from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the U.S.’s hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.
Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.
Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states–the United States and Russia. The United States bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.
Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.
Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.
After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.
Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.
Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. After President Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Senator Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.
Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.
A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden hasstill not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.
Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine. Biden took office as the first Covid vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the United States and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”
Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a non-profit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the United States and other Western countries chose to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the Covid virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the Delta and Omicron variants
Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for Covid vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.
Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock-puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.
Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the United States has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.
Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantanamo torture victims. Under President Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.
In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Twenty years after it set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new, closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.
Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the United States tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.
Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the United States’s own democratic and human rights credentials.
Juan Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras – and maybe Brazil in 2022.
Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to okay a $650 million weapons sale. The United States still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, MBS, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes. The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.
Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including tranferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized border, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.
But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.
Conclusion
Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional–even global–instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.
The United States has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.
Candidate Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but has instead doubled down on the policies through which the United States lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.
Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond—albeit reluctantly—by adopting more dovish and rational ways.
The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called “provocations” by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own “credibility”.
This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in London and elsewhere – is code for allowing the US to act like a global gangster while claiming to be the world’s policeman. US “credibility” was apparently thrown into question last summer – and only when President Joe Biden held firm to a pledge to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.
Prominent critics, including in the Pentagon, objected that any troop withdrawal would both suggest the US was backing off from a commitment to maintain the so-called “international order” and further embolden the West’s “enemies” – from the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) group to Russia and China.
In a postmortem in September, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, echoed a view common in Washington: “I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go – and I think that damage is one word that could be used.”
At the same time, a former defence official in the George W Bush administration judged US credibility after the Afghanistan withdrawal at “rock bottom“.
The only way this understanding of US “credibility” makes sense is if one disregards the disastrous previous two decades of Washington’s role in Afghanistan. Those were the years in which the US army propped up a bunch of wildly unpopular kleptocrats in Kabul who ransacked the public coffers as the US launched an arms’ length drone war that ended up killing large numbers of Afghan civilians.
To bolster its apparently diminished “credibility” after the troop withdrawal, the US has imposed crushing sanctions on Afghanistan, deepening its current famine. There have also been reports of CIA efforts to run covert operations against the Taliban by aiding its opponents.
Cold War relic
Washington’s “credibility” was also seemingly in peril when US and Russian officials met in Geneva this week for negotiations in the midst of a diplomatic, and potential military, standoff over Ukraine.
The background are demands from Moscow that Washington stops encircling Russia with military bases and that Nato end its relentless advancement towards Russia’s borders. Nato should be a relic of a Cold War-era that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Moscow dissolved its own version of Nato, the Warsaw Pact, more than three decades ago.
Russia had been given verbal assurances in 1990 by George HW Bush’s administration that Nato would not expand militarily beyond the borders of what was then West Germany. Seven years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, which committed Russia and Nato not to treat each other “as adversaries”, while Nato reiterated that there would be no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in former Eastern bloc states.
Every subsequent US administration has flagrantly broken both of these pledges, with Nato troops now stationed across eastern Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, Moscow feels as menaced by Nato’s aggressive posturing, which serves to revive its Cold War fears, as Washington would if Russia placed military bases in Cuba and Mexico.
No one should forget that the US was prepared to bring the world to the brink of armageddon in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent Moscow from stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Historic alliance
Despite the current clamour about the need for the US to maintain its “credibility”, Washington was in fact only being asked at the Geneva talks to start honouring, 30 years late, commitments it made long ago and has repeatedly violated.
The latest flashpoint is Ukraine, Russia’s neighbour, which has been roiling since a coup in 2014 overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow. The deeply divided country is split between those who want to prioritise their historic ties with Russia and those who want to be embraced by the European Union.
Moscow – and a proportion of Ukrainians – believe Washington and Europe are exploiting the push for an economic pact to engineer Ukraine’s subordination to Nato security policies, directed against Russia. Such fears are not misplaced. Each of what were formerly Soviet states that became an EU member has also been recruited to Nato. In fact, since 2009 it has been an official requirement, through the Treaty of Lisbon, that EU member states align their security policies with Nato.
Now US “credibility” apparently depends on its determination to bring Nato to Russia’s front door, via Ukraine.
US perfidy
Reporting on a working dinner with Russian diplomats last Sunday, before the Geneva meeting, Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, recast that perfidy as the US stressing its commitment to “the freedom of sovereign nations to choose their own alliances”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is being widely made out to be the aggressor after he posted tens of thousands of troops at the border with Ukraine.
One can argue whether those soldiers are massed for an invasion of Ukraine, as is being widely assumed in the western media, or as a show of force against a US-led Nato that believes it can do whatever it pleases in Russia’s backyard. Either way, a miscalculation by either side could prove disastrous.
According to the New York Times, General Milley has warned the Russians that an invasion force would face a prolonged insurgency backed by US weaponry. There are reports that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles have already been delivered to Ukraine.
Similarly, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has threatened“confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine”.
Drumbeat of war
This reckless way of projecting “credibility” – and thereby making confrontations and war more, not less, likely – is currently on show in relation to another nuclear-armed power, China. For many months, the Biden administration has been playing what looks like a game of chicken with Beijing over China’s continuing assertion of a right to use force against Taiwan, a self-governing island off the coast of China that Beijing claims as its territory.
Few countries formally recognise Taiwan as a state, and nothing in relations between Taipei and China is settled. That includes heated disagreements over the division of airspace, with Taiwan – backed by the US – claiming that a whole chunk of southeast mainland China falls within its “defence zone”. That means the scaremongering headlines about record numbers of Chinese warplanes flying over Taiwan need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
The same disputes apply to China and Taiwan’s respective claims to territorial waters, with a similar potential for provocation. The pair’s conflicting views of what constitutes their security and sovereignty are a ready hair-trigger for war – and in circumstances where one party possesses a large nuclear arsenal.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration has stomped into this long-simmering feud by feeding the media with alarmist headlines and security analysts with talking points about a possible US war with China over Taiwan. Top Pentagon officials have also stoked concerns of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by China.
Diplomatically, President Biden snubbed his nose at Beijing by inviting Taiwan to attend his so-called “democracy summit” last month. The event further inflamed Chinese indignation by showing Taiwan and China in separate colours on a regional map.
The CIA has announced the establishment of a new espionage centre with an exclusive focus on China. According to CIA director William Burns, it is necessary because the US is faced with “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. That “adversary”, however, poses no direct threat to US security – unless Washington chooses provocatively to bring Taiwan under its security umbrella.
Washington’s drumbeat has been so constant that a recent poll showed more than half of Americans supported sending US troops to defend Taiwan.
Nuclear hard line
The picture is the same with Iran. US “credibility” is being cited as the reason why Washington needs to take a hard line against Tehran – goaded, as ever, by Israel – on its presumed ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.
Israel, of course, has had its own large arsenal of nuclear weapons for decades – entirely unmonitored and in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both the US and Israel fear Iran wants to level the nuclear playing field in the Middle East. Israel is determined to make sure that only it has the power to make nuclear-backed threats, either against others in the region or as leverage in Washington to get its way.
President Barack Obama’s administration signed an agreement with Iran in 2015 placing strict limits on Tehran’s development of nuclear technology. In return, Washington lifted some of the most punishing sanctions on the country. Three years later, however, President Donald Trump reneged on the deal.
Now Iran suffers the worst of both worlds. The US has again intensified the sanctions regime while demanding that Tehran renew the deal on worse terms – and with no promise, according to US Secretary of State Blinken, that the next US administration won’t tear up the agreement anyway.
US “credibility” does not depend, it seems, on Washington being required to keep its word.
In the background, as ever, is the threat of joint military reprisals from Israel and the US. In October, Biden reportedly asked his national security adviser to review Pentagon plans for a military strike if this one-sided “diplomatic process” failed. A month later, Israel approved $1.5bn for precisely such an eventuality.
Drunk on power
Washington’s emphasis on its “credibility” is actually a story the US elite tells itself and western publics to obscure the truth. What is really prized is America’s ability to enforce its economic interests and military superiority unchallenged across the globe.
After the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the US overthrow of the elected government of Iran to reinstall its dictator-monarch, there is barely a corner of the planet where the US has not meddled. In Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and its so-called “backyard”, Latin America, US “credibility” has required interventions and war as an alternative to diplomacy.
In October 2019, as Trump suggested that US troops would be pulled out of Syria – where they had no authorisation from the United Nations to be in the first place – Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and former head of the CIA, observed that the decision had “weakened the US” and “undercut our credibility in the world”.
He added: “There isn’t an ally that we’ve around the world that doesn’t now distrust us and worry about whether or not we will stand by our word.”
But this kind of credibility is built not on principle, on respecting others’ national sovereignty, or on peace-building, but on the gangsterism of a superpower drunk on its own power and its ability to intimidate and crush rivals.
Washington’s “word” is only selectively kept, as its treatment of Russia and Iran highlight. And enforcement of its “credibility” – from breaking commitments to threatening war – has had a predictable effect: they have driven Washington’s “enemies” into an opposition camp out of necessity.
The US has created a more menacing adversary, as Russia and China, two nuclear powers, have found a common purpose in asserting a countervailing pressure on Washington. Since the late summer, the two have held a series of war games and joint military exercises, each of them a first.
The world is entering what looks like a new, even more complex cold war, in which any misunderstanding, mishap or false move could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation. If it happens, the pursuit of US “credibility” will have played a central part in the catastrophe.
During the 21st century, the US, working with corporate elites, traditional oligarchies, military, and corporate media, has continually attempted coups against Latin American governments which place the needs of their people over US corporate interests. US organized coups in Latin American countries is hardly a 20th century phenomenon.
However, this century the US rulers have turned to a new coup strategy, relying on soft coups, a significant change from the notoriously brutal military hard coups in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries in the 1970s. One central US concern in these new coups has been to maintain a legal and democratic facade as much as possible.
The US superpower recognizes successful soft coups depend on mobilizing popular forces in anti-government marches and protests. Gene Sharp style color revolutions are heavily funded by US and European NGOs, such as USAID, NED, National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. They make use of organizations professing “human rights” (such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), local dissident organizations, and increasingly, liberal-left media (even Democracy Now) to prepare the groundwork.
US regime change operations have found three mechanisms this century that have been tremendously successful. First, economic warfare on a country, through sanctions and outright blockades, creates rising discontent against the targeted government. Second, increasing use of corporate media and social media to spread disinformation (often around “human rights,” “democracy,” “freedom,” or “corruption”) to foment mass movements against leaders that prioritize their nation’s development over US financial interests. This heavily relies on CIA social media operations to blanket a country with disinformation. Third, lawfare, using the appearance of democratic legality to bring down those defending their country’s national sovereignty. Related to lawfare are the electoral coups in countries such as Haiti, Honduras, and Brazil, where the US engineers or helps to engineer a coup by stealing the election.
Many of the attempted coups failed because the people mobilized to defend their governments, and because of crucial and timely solidarity declarations in defense of these governments by the Latin American bodies of the OAS, UNASUR, and the Rio Group. Today, the Rio Group no longer exists, UNASUR is much weakened, and the OAS is now fully under US control.
US Backed Coups and Attempted Coups
2001 Haiti. Haitian paramilitaries based in the Dominican Republic launched an attack on the National Palace, seat of the government of President Aristide. The attack failed, but until 2004, similar to the 1980s Nicaraguan contras, these paramilitaries launched numerous raids into Haiti, and played a key role leading to the 2004 coup perpetrated directly by US troops.
2002 Venezuela. The US government partially funded and backed the short-lived April 11-14 coup against Hugo Chavez.
2002-3 Venezuela. Management of the state oil company PDVSA organized an “oil strike,” actually a lockout of the oil workers, to drive Hugo Chavez out of power. This again failed in early 2003.
2003 Cuba. In the lead up to the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, John Bolton claimed Cuba was a state sponsor of terrorism, producing biological weapons for terrorist purposes, just as Saddam’s Iraq was falsely claimed to have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). During this period, the US increased its anti-Cuba propaganda directed at the country and increased funding to “pro-democracy” groups in Cuba, while anti-Cuban right-wing groups escalated their activities. The US paid “dissident” groups to organize protests and disruptions, including hijacking seven boats and airplanes to reach the US where they were never prosecuted. The goal was to create the appearance of disorder in Cuba, which, combined with its alleged biological WMDs, demanded an international intervention to restore order. Cuba squashed this movement in spring 2003.
2004 Haiti. In an early 20th century style US coup, US troops invaded Haiti, kidnapped President Jean Bertrande Aristide and exiled him to the Central African Republic.
2008 Bolivia. The Media Luna attempted coup involved right-wing leaders and some indigenous groups from Bolivia’s lowlands financed by the US. They sought to separate the richer Media Luna region from the rest of the country. In the process, they killed 20 supporters of President Evo Morales. Juan Ramon Quintana of the Bolivian government reported that between 2007-2015, the NED gave $10 million in funding to some 40 institutions including economic and social centers, foundations and NGOs. US embassy cables showed it sought to turn social and indigenous movements against the Evo Morales government.
2009 Honduras. Honduran military forces, under orders from the US, seized President Manuel Zelaya, brought him to the US military base at Palmerola, then exiled him to Costa Rica. This began an era of brutal neoliberal narco-trafficking regimes that ended in 2021 with the landslide election of Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife.
2010 Ecuador. In September a failed coup against President Rafael Correa by military and police units backed by the indigenous organizations CONAIE and Pachakutik. The US had infiltrated the police and armed forces, while the NED and USAID funded these indigenous organizations.
2011 Haiti. Following the Haiti earthquake in 2010 that killed 200,000, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton imposed Michel Martelly as president after threatening to cut off US aid to Haiti. Clinton flew to Haiti to demand that Martelly be named one of the two runoff candidates, although Martelly was not recognized by the Electoral Council as one of the qualifiers. Despite a voter boycott, with fewer than 20% of the electorate voting, Martelly was announced the winner of the “runoff.” One reason why most Haitians boycotted was that the most popular political party in the country, Fanmi Lavalas, the party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was excluded from the ballot. The Haiti elections were funded by USAID, Canada, the OAS, the European Union and other foreign bodies.
2012 Paraguay. President Fernando Lugo was scapegoated for a land occupation confrontation between campesinos and the police, which led to 17 deaths. President Lugo was removed from office without a chance to defend himself in a lawfare coup.
2013 Venezuela. After the April election that Nicolas Maduro narrowly won, Henrique Capriles, the US-supported loser, claimed the election was stolen and called his supporters out into the streets in violent protests. Due to the strength of the UNASUR countries at the time, the US could not convince other countries to also reject Maduro’s victory.
2014 Venezuela. “La Salida”(The Exit), led by Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado, resulted in 43 deaths, and aimed to drive President Maduro from power. Again, the US could not get other Latin American governments to denounce Maduro, either in UNASUR or in the OAS.
2015 Ecuador. Between 2012-2015, $30 million from NED went to political parties, trade unions, dissident movements, and media. In 2013 alone, USAID and NED spent $24 million in Ecuador. This paid off in 2015 when CONAIE, which thanked USAID for its funding, called for an indigenous-led uprising. They began with marches in early August and concluded in Quito for an uprising and general strike on August 10. The attempted coup failed.
2015 Haiti. A new electoral coup for the presidency was funded by the US to the tune of $30 million. Both the US and the OAS refused Haitians’ demands to invalidate the election. The police attacked Supporters of opposition parties were shot with live and rubber bullets, killing many. President Michel Martelly’s chosen successor Jovenel Moise became president.
2015 Guatemala. The US engineered a coup against right-wing President Otto Perez Molina because he was not sufficiently subservient.
2015 Argentina. Argentine prosecutor Alber Nisman was evidently murdered days after he made bogus criminal charges against President Cristina Fernandez, claiming she was involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. This was used to create a scandal, unseat her, and bring neoliberals back to power. Neoliberal forces and media used the case to disrupt the Kirchner coalition from winning another presidential election.
2015-2019El Salvador. El Salvador’s right-wing opposition backed by the US sought to destabilize the government of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The conservative mass media launched a smear campaign against the administration, in concert with a surge in gang-driven homicides that the police chief said was part of a campaign to drive up body counts and remove the FMLN government. Sanchez Cerén and other former officials who were members of the FMLN later became targets of lawfare, “a strategy used in recent years by conservative groups in power to try to demobilize the organization and resistance of the peoples against neoliberalism and other forms of domination.”
2016 Brazil. US-backed right-wing movements launched a campaign against President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party for “corruption.” Aided by the corporate media, they organized a series of protests in Brazil’s largest cities throughout 2015. In March 2016, a massive political demonstration brought together more than 500,000 people in support of impeaching President Rousseff. She was finally impeached by Congress and removed from office in a successful lawfare coup.
2017 Venezuela. Violent protests (guarimbas), led by Leopoldo Lopez, sought to oust President Maduro, with 126 fatalities. The guarimbas ended after the elections for the National Constituent Assembly.
2017 Honduras. The US supported an electoral coup by President Juan Orlando Hernández involving widespread electoral fraud and government killing of dozens in protests. The US quickly recognized him as president and pressured other countries to do so also, even though the OAS itself had called for a new election.
2018 Nicaragua. US-backed violent protests, supported by anti-FSLN media and social media disinformation campaigns, sought to remove President Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas from power. After two months, public sentiment turned strongly against the violent protests and they disintegrated.
2018 Brazil. Former President Lula de Silva was the leading candidate to win the presidential election, but was imprisoned due to a lawfare operation of the US and Brazil’s right-wing, using bogus corruption charges. Bolsonario won the election, aided by a large-scale fake news operation which sent out hundreds of millions of WhatsApp messages to Brazilian voters.
2019 Venezuela. In January, Juan Guaido declared himself president of Venezuela after US Vice President Pence assured him of US recognition. On April 30, the Guaido-Leopoldo Lopez’ planned uprising outside an air force base flopped. Later, a mercenary attack from Colombia failed to seize President Maduro in the presidential palace.
2019 Bolivia. The US engineered a coup against Evo Morales, in part by using a social media campaign to make the false claim he stole the election. The OAS played a key role in legitimizing the coup. The disastrous coup government of Jeanine Anez lasted for just over one year.
2021 Cuba. The US orchestrated and funded protests against the Cuban government in July and November. The US sought to build a new generation of counter-revolutionary leadership by creating new “independent” press and social media platforms. These failed more miserably than the 2003 protests.
2021 Bolivia. In October, the right-wing tried to organize a coup and general strike, demanding the release of former President Anez who was now imprisoned. The attempt was only successful in Santa Cruz, the center of the Media Luna. Later, mass organizations led a rally, encompassing 1.5 million, to the capital to defend the MAS government.
2021 Peru. The right-wing oligarchy used lawfare unsuccessfully to unseat new President Castillo, a leader who emerged from the popular indigenous movement, seeking to remove him for being “permanently morally incapable.” However, a new lawfare case has been brought against President Castillo concerning “corruption.”
2021 Nicaragua. The US planned to repeat the 2018 Nicaragua protests, combined with a concocted campaign that the Daniel Ortega government had imprisoned US-financed opposition “pre-candidates” before the presidential election. This coup attempt failed but the US and OAS refused to recognize the election results.
In 2022 we can expect the US to continue “regime change” operations against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and now Chile with the election of progressive President Boric.
This list of 27 US-backed coups and attempted coups in the first 21 years of this century may be incomplete. For instance, not included are the lawfare frame-ups directed by Ecuador’s former President Lenin Moreno, a US puppet, against former Vice President Jorge Glas, who is now imprisoned, nor against former President Rafael Correa, now in exile.
This listing of US coups and attempted coups is also misleading. As throughout the 20th century, the US daily, not periodically, interferes in what it considers its colonies to both impose neocolonial regimes and maintain those regimes which open their markets to the US without conditions and align themselves with US foreign policy.
Under the facade of “democracy promotion” Washington works to advance the exact opposite goal: foment coups against democratic and popular governments. Governments and leaders that stand up for their people and their national rights are the very targets of “democracy promotion” coups.
Present day US reliance on soft coup operations involves funding not only NGOs and right-wing groups in the targeted countries for training in Gene Sharp style “democracy promotion” programs. Many liberal and liberal-left alternative media and NGOs in the US now receive corporate funding, which pushes their political outlook in a more pro-imperialist direction. This is well-illustrated in the soft coup attempts against Evo’s Bolivia and Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. These NGOs and alternative media give a false humanitarian face to imperialist intervention.
Moreover, these regime change operations are now openly being used at home against the US people. This is seen in the confusion and political divisions in the US population, manufactured by the 2016 Hillary Clinton Russiagate disinformation campaign against Trump and the Trump 2020 stolen election disinformation campaign against the Democrats. For those of us opposed to US interventionism, we are called upon to expose these new sophisticated methods of soft coup interference, to demand the national sovereignty of other nations be respected, and to bring together the US people against this manipulation by the corporate rulers.
The US presidential doctrine is an odd creature. Usually summoned up by security wonks and satellite personnel who revolve around the President, these eventually assume the name of the person holding office. They are given the force of a Papal bull and treated by the priest pundits as binding, coherent and sound.
Much of this is often simple mythmaking for the imperial minder in the White House, betraying what are often shallow understandings about global politics and movements. Clarity and details are often found wanting. Variety in such doctrinal matters, the Soviet Union’s veteran diplomat Andrei Gromyko noted in casting his eye over the US approach, meant that there was no “solid, coherent and consistent policy” in the field.
In the case of President Joe Biden, any doctrine was bound to be a readjustment made in hostility to the Trump administration, at least superficially. But in so many ways, Biden has simply pulled down the blinds and kept the US policy train going, notably in its approach to China and its unabashed embrace of the Anglosphere. There remain smatterings of nativism, doses of protectionism. There is the childlike evangelism that insists on enlightened democracy doing battle with vicious autocracy. This was, according to Foreign Affairs, the “everything doctrine”.
Such an approach would barely astonish. Former US Defense Secretary Bob Gates did claim in his memoir with sharp certitude that the current President’s record, prior to coming to office, was patchy, proving to be “wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
At the time, a stung White House demurred from the view through remarks made by National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden. “The President [Barack Obama] disagrees with Secretary Gates’ assessment – from his leadership on the Balkans in the Senate, to his efforts to end the war in Iraq, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time, and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, writing mid-November last year, suggested that the world was finally getting a sense of “the contours of” Biden’s foreign policy, which was a veritable shop of goodies. “He has,” she claimed in reproach, much along the line taken in Foreign Affairs, “something for everyone.” For the China bashers, he has pushed “the QUAD” of India, Australia, Japan and the United States and created AUKUS, “a new British, Australian, US nexus with the … submarine deal, no matter how clumsily handled.”
A throbbing human rights narrative has also taken some shape, an approach neither convincing nor commanding. Again, China features as a main target, being accused of genocide and grave human rights abuses, though Beijing can be assured that the sword of US military power will be, at least for the moment, sheathed from attempts to protect them. What remains less certain is whether the same thing can be said about Taiwan.
The liberal internationalists can cheer the boosting rhetoric of international institutions: the gleeful nod towards the World Health Organization, the recommitment of the US to pursuing goals to alleviate the problems of climate change; the revitalisation of NATO, an alliance derided by President Donald Trump.
From Chatham House, we see the view that Biden’s “pragmatic realism”, which eschews sentimentalism to traditional allies while still respecting them, took European partners “off-guard” with Washington’s energetic focus on the Indo-Pacific.
Slaughter has charged that, if all are recipients of something, a doctrine remains hard to “pin down”. She remains unconvinced by the stacked pantry, wishing to see a more concerted effort that embraces “thinking that shifts away from states, whether great powers or lesser powers, democracies or autocracies”. Embrace, she commands, “globalism”, with an emphasis on cooperation irrespective of political or ideological stripes. “From a people-first perspective, saving the planet for humanity must be a goal that takes precedence over all others.”
This view is far from spanking in its novelty. With every change of the guard in Washington, opinions such as those of Slaughter become resurgent, often messianic urgings that claim to make things anew and see the world afresh. In her case, there is a recycled One World quality to it, with the US, of course, as central leader. As a presidential candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton insisted that it was “time to put people first”. In accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1996, he spoke of building “that bridge to the 21st century, to meet our challenges and protect our values”.
How fine a vision that turned out to be, with the US ensuring its position as the sole superpower, with an amassed military able to strike, globally, any part of the planet with impunity and, as Clinton himself showed, frivolous, criminal distraction. Washington continued to bribe and coddle satraps and client states, seeking janitors to mind the imperium and keep any power that might dare to challenge the status quo in stern, severe check. Little wonder, then, that Beijing threatens such self-serving understanding.
The transcendent, humanity-driven view will not sit well in the Bidenverse, which remains moored in a brand of power politics that is Trumpism shorn, with a range of other antecedents. The “America First” ideals of the previous president have been retained, though the howling about the risks of a complex world has simply been delivered in another register. The open question, and one yielding a potentially troubling answer, is how far US military power will be used to shore up a shoddy, shallow doctrine that shows all the signs of the old.
Donald Trump thinks he’s still president according to no more reliable a source than Rachel Maddow on her February 5th show. This was confirmed in May by Vanity Fair. Right-wing conspiracy theorists echo this analysis as recently as this month. Left-liberals are smugly confident that Kamala Harris’s running mate is in the White House, snoozing in the presidential bedroom. Inquiring minds ask what is the evidence nearly a year into the alleged Biden presidency that there has been a change of guard in Washington?
+The Obama-Biden union card check proposal was not on Mr. Trump’s political horizon, nor is it on that of the current occupant in the White House.
By and large, Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past twenty years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy.
In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Obama and Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but for the most part delivered more endless war.
By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal and normalization of relations with Cuba. So progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice-president would lead him to quickly restore and build on Obama’s achievements with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.
President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.
The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an opportunity for people and governments around the world to express their concerns about the flaws in U.S. democracy and the undemocratic way the United States deals with the rest of the world. Here are just a few issues that should be considered:
(1) The U.S. claims to be a leader in global democracy at a time when its own already deeply flawed democracy is crumbling, as evidenced by the shocking January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. On top of the systemic problem of a duopoly that keeps other political parties locked out and the obscene influence of money in politics, the U.S. electoral system is being further eroded by the increasing tendency to contest credible election results and widespread efforts to suppress voter participation (19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote).
A broad global ranking of countries by various measures of democracy puts the U.S. at # 33, while the U.S. government-funded Freedom House ranks the United States at # 61 in the world for political freedom and civil liberties, on a par with Mongolia, Panama and Romania.
(2) The unspoken U.S. agenda at this “summit” is to demonize and isolate China and Russia. But if we agree that democracies should be judged by how they treat their people, then why is the U.S. Congress failing to pass a bill to provide basic services like health care, child care, housing and education, which are guaranteed to most Chinese citizens for free or at minimal cost?
And consider China’s extraordinary success in relieving poverty. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”
China has also far surpassed the U.S. in dealing with the pandemic. Little wonder a Harvard University report found that over 90% of the Chinese people like their government. One would think that China’s extraordinary domestic achievements would make the Biden administration a bit more humble about its “one-size-fits-all” concept of democracy.
(3) The climate crisis and the pandemic are a wake-up call for global cooperation, but this Summit is transparently designed to exacerbate divisions. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors to Washington have publicly accused the United States of staging the summit to stoke ideological confrontation and divide the world into hostile camps, while China held a competing International Democracy Forum with 120 countries the weekend before the U.S. summit.
Inviting the government of Taiwan to the U.S. summit further erodes the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China policy and agreed to cut back military installations on Taiwan.
Also invited is the corrupt anti-Russian government installed by the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which reportedly has half its military forces poised to invade the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, who declared independence in response to the 2014 coup. The U.S. and NATO have so far supported this major escalation of a civil war that already killed 14,000 people.
(4) The U.S. and its Western allies—the self-anointed leaders of human rights—just happen to be the major suppliers of weapons and training to some of the world’s most vicious dictators. Despite its verbal commitment to human rights, the Biden administration and Congress recently approved a $650 million weapons deal for Saudi Arabia at a time when this repressive kingdom is bombing and starving the people of Yemen.
Heck, the administration even uses U.S. tax dollars to “donate” weapons to dictators, like General Sisi in Egypt, who oversees a regime with thousands of political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Of course, these U.S. allies were not invited to the Democracy Summit—that would be too embarrassing.
(5) Perhaps someone should inform Biden that the right to survive is a basic human right. The right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
So why is the U.S. imposing brutal sanctions on countries from Venezuela to North Korea that are causing inflation, scarcity, and malnutrition among children? Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has blasted the United States for engaging in “economic warfare” and compared its illegal unilateral sanctions to medieval sieges. No country that purposely denies children the right to food and starves them to death can call itself a champion of democracy.
(6) Since the United States was defeated by the Taliban and withdrew its occupation forces from Afghanistan, it is acting as a very sore loser and reneging on basic international and humanitarian commitments. Certainly Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a setback for human rights, especially for women, but pulling the plug on Afghanistan’s economy is catastrophic for the entire nation.
The United States is denying the new government access to billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in U.S. banks, causing a collapse in the banking system. Hundreds of thousands of public servants have not been paid. The UN is warning that millions of Afghans are at risk of starving to death this winter as the result of these coercive measures by the United States and its allies.
(7) It’s telling that the Biden administration had such a difficult time finding Middle Eastern countries to invite to the summit. The United States just spent 20 years and $8 trillion trying to impose its brand of democracy on the Middle East and Afghanistan, so you’d think it would have a few proteges to showcase.
But no. In the end, they could only agree to invite the state of Israel, an apartheid regime that enforces Jewish supremacy over all the land it occupies, legally or otherwise. Embarrassed to have no Arab states attending, the Biden administration added Iraq, whose unstable government has been racked by corruption and sectarian divisions ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its brutal security forces have killed over 600 demonstrators since huge anti-government protests began in 2019.
(8) What, pray tell, is democratic about the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo Bay? The U.S. Government opened the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002 as a way to circumvent the rule of law as it kidnapped and jailed people without trial after the crimes of September 11, 2001. Since then, 780 men have been detained there. Very few were charged with any crime or confirmed as combatants, but still they were tortured, held for years without charges, and never tried.
This gross violation of human rights continues, with most of the 39 remaining detainees never even charged with a crime. Yet this country that has locked up hundreds of innocent men with no due process for up to 20 years still claims the authority to pass judgment on the legal processes of other countries, in particular on China’s efforts to cope with Islamist radicalism and terrorism among its Uighur minority.
(9) With the recent investigations into the March 2019 U.S. bombing in Syria that left 70 civilians dead and the drone strike that killed an Afghan family of ten in August 2021, the truth of massive civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and airstrikes is gradually emerging, as well as how these war crimes have perpetuated and fueled the “war on terror,” instead of winning or ending it.
If this was a real democracy summit, whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have risked so much to expose the reality of U.S. war crimes to the world, would be honored guests at the summit instead of political prisoners in the American gulag.
(10) The United States picks and chooses countries as “democracies” on an entirely self-serving basis. But in the case of Venezuela, it has gone even farther and invited an imaginary U.S.-appointed “president” instead of the country’s actual government.
The Trump administration anointed Juan Guaidó as “president” of Venezuela, and Biden invited him to the summit, but Guaidó is neither a president nor a democrat, and he boycotted parliamentary elections in 2020 and regional elections in 2021. But Guaido did come tops in one recent opinion poll, with the highest public disapproval of any opposition figure in Venezuela at 83%, and the lowest approval rating at 13%.
Guaidó named himself “interim president” (without any legal mandate) in 2019, and launched a failed coup against the elected government of Venezuela. When all his U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow the government failed, Guaidó signed off on a mercenary invasion which failed even more spectacularly. The European Union no longer recognizes Guaido’s claim to the presidency, and his “interim foreign minister” recently resigned, accusing Guaidó of corruption.
Conclusion
Just as the people of Venezuela have not elected or appointed Juan Guaidó as their president, the people of the world have not elected or appointed the United States as the president or leader of all Earthlings.
When the United States emerged from the Second World War as the strongest economic and military power in the world, its leaders had the wisdom not to claim such a role. Instead they brought the whole world together to form the United Nations, on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, a universal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and a prohibition on the threat or use of force against each other.
The United States enjoyed great wealth and international power under the UN system it devised. But in the post-Cold War era, power-hungry U.S. leaders came to see the UN Charter and the rule of international law as obstacles to their insatiable ambitions. They belatedly staked a claim to universal global leadership and dominance, relying on the threat and use of force that the UN Charter prohibits. The results have been catastrophic for millions of people in many countries, including Americans.
Since the United States has invited its friends from around the world to this ”democracy summit,” maybe they can use the occasion to try to persuade their bomb-toting friend to recognize that its bid for unilateral global power has failed, and that it should instead make a real commitment to peace, cooperation and international democracy under the rules-based order of the UN Charter.
Beijing accuses nations of using Games ‘for political manipulation’ amid diplomatic boycotts
China has said that Australia, Britain and the US will pay a price for their “mistaken acts” after deciding not to send government delegations to February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, in the latest warning demonstrating China’s escalating diplomatic tensions with the US and its major allies.
The US was the first to announce a boycott, saying on Monday its government officials would not attend the February Games because of China’s human rights “atrocities”, weeks after talks aimed at easing tension between the world’s two largest economies.
Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images
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