A recent military parade in Pyongyang showcased the country’s
intercontinental ballistic missile. Kim Jong Un used the opportunity of the spectacle to
promise that he would push the country’s nuclear program forward at maximum speed.
To top it off, North Korea has been improving its tactical nuclear
weapons, which means that it may soon be able to threaten South Korea with a
nuclear strike as well.
North Korea’s nuclear program has been the perennial threat that
concerns South Korea, East Asia, and the United States. Some pundits are even suggesting
that the nature of this threat has recently changed—that North Korea is no
longer just interested in possessing nuclear weapons in order to deter attacks
by other countries. Instead, as Washington
Post columnist Josh Rogin argues, North Korea is now seriously considering using nuclear weapons for
offensive purposes as part of an effort to take over the Korean peninsula.
This seems far-fetched. Pyongyang
has difficulty even maintaining control of its own territory. Having seen Russia’s embarrassing failure to take over Ukraine, a
considerably weaker country, the North Korean government can’t seriously
believe that it could invade and control South Korea, a considerably stronger
country.
True, Russia’s nuclear weapons have made the United States and NATO
reluctant to confront Russian forces directly in Ukraine, but they haven’t
provided the Kremlin with any practical advantage over Ukraine on the
battlefield. Given the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and U.S. security
guarantees to South Korea, Pyongyang wouldn’t be able to use nuclear blackmail
to aid in some hare-brained effort to seize the entire peninsula.
After all, Pyongyang knows that any use of nuclear weapons, be they
against its southern neighbor or the United States, will result in massive
retaliation. The North Korean leadership would be committing suicide if it
launched an ICBM or tactical nuke.
No, in fact, nuclear weapons are not the biggest threat that North Korea
poses to the world. North Korea’s greatest liability is something that it
currently views as an asset: its radical isolation.
To protect itself against COVID-19, North Korea has closed its borders. During the pandemic, it even shut
down trade with its principal economic partner, China, only resuming trade in
January. Virtually all diplomatic staff have left
the country, and so have humanitarian aid workers.
Fine, you might say, isolation befits North Korea. It doesn’t produce anything that
the world particularly wants, unlike Russia and its oil, gas, and military
exports. If it doesn’t want to play with others, it
should be left undisturbed in its own sandbox.
But such isolation is actually dangerous—and not just for North Koreans.
As part of its radical isolationism, North Korea has refused any COVID vaccines. It has so far turned down offers of three
million doses of Sinovac and two million of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University
vaccine.
The country’s population of 25 million unvaccinated people offers COVID
an extraordinary opportunity not only to spread but also to mutate. A powerful new Pyongyang variant
would not stay within the borders of North Korea. Even those who have little empathy for the plight of North Koreans have
to understand that a new COVID variant could potentially kill hundreds of
thousands if not millions of people all over the world.
Providing North Korea with tens of millions of doses of the Pfizer or
Moderna vaccines— the more effective drugs that the North Korean government
reportedly prefers—would neutralize the country’s inadvertent biological
weapon.
But North Korea’s isolation is dangerous for other reasons.
The cultural isolation of the population has made it easier for the
government to maintain its control over society. True, North Koreans manage to get
some information from the outside, including South Korean TV dramas. But isolation increases the atomization of the population, making it all
the more difficult to develop a civil society apart from the government sphere.
And the geopolitical isolation of the country—North Korea doesn’t belong
to any regional organizations and, aside from the United Nations, few
international organizations—makes it difficult to embed the country into the
system of global laws and norms.
The North Korean government is certainly ambivalent about its isolation.
On the one
hand, Pyongyang doesn’t want to expose itself to what it considers to be
various political and economic viruses—democracy, an unregulated free
market—circulating in the outside world. On the other hand, the North Korean
leadership recognizes that it cannot achieve its goal of a “strong and
prosperous nation” behind high, impregnable walls. It has, for instance,
consistently relied on China to sustain its economy. But the North Korean leadership views its current dependency on Chinese
trade to be unacceptable, both because of the perceived inferior quality of
Chinese goods and because of the risk of China using its advantage to put
pressure on Pyongyang.
The bottom line is that North Korea wants to engage the outside world on
its own terms.
Generally, the outside world has not been willing to meet North Korea
halfway. Sanctions
impede any serious economic engagement with the country. Hostile rhetoric
prevents most political engagement. Even
cultural engagement has been largely off the table, particularly during the
pandemic.
These efforts to reinforce North Korea’s isolation are
counter-productive. They only push the country into engaging in more of the behaviors that
the outside world finds so noxious. And, in the case of COVID vaccines and
humanitarian assistance, the outside world may well be creating the conditions
for a catastrophe of massive proportions that will inevitably have negative
consequences far beyond North Korea’s borders.
The disasters of war in Ukraine have not
yet found their Francisco Goya, but it is, like any other war, a picture of death and destruction, which the mainstream media erroneously conveys as worst then any other war. This war, like all its predecessors,
is hell. Writing about the putatively good war of 1939-1945, Nicholson Baker in Human
Smoke described its
beginnings as the advent of civilization’s end with the records of both sides
marred by the most horrific war crimes. The reporting of Nicholas Turse in Shoot
Anything that Moves about
the war in Vietnam and of Vincent Bevins in The
Jakarta Method about
Washington-backed massacres worldwide in the Cold War showed Americans in these
two cases as arch perpetrators of war crimes. Chalmers Johnson in the Blowback trilogy and Dismantling
the Empire compiled
long lists of American enormities in what he called our obsessive wars of
empire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Vladimir Putin record in Ukraine is still far from his worst enemies proclaim, but even at that it is well within the
norm for war, the selective indignation about him notwithstanding. War and
crimes go together. A question larger than the one about Putin’s "war crimes" concerns the origins of the war itself. Who or what caused the war? From that
first cause ineluctable consequences of a criminal character followed.
On the principle that historical
analysis requires an attempt to understand the motives of all sides in a war,
the Russian argument deserves a fair hearing. Roy Medvedev, one of Russia’s
most distinguished historians gave an
interview on March 2, 2022, to the Corriere della Sera. The ninety-six-year-old Medvedev
succinctly expressed the Kremlin view of the Ukraine crisis as a clash involving
far more than Putin’s concern about NATO expansion to his country’s borders.
The metastasizing of NATO illustrated but did not define for Russia the
fundamental issue, which had to do with the failure of the USA to understand
that the unipolar moment of its rules-based order had ended. The time had come
for a paradigm shift in international relations.
As an example of the American hegemony’s
failures, Medvedev commented on the effects of Washington’s supervisory role in
Russia’s transition to capitalism. He was referring to the misery befalling
Russia at Cold War’s end and astringently described by the Nobel Prize-winning
Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz in Globalization
and Its Discontents (2002).
In general, Stiglitz could find nothing moral or competent in the way
globalization had been imposed upon the world by the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department. Globalization had
turned into an enrichment scheme for international elites implementing and benefitting
from the neoliberal Washington Consensus.
When Stiglitz came to discuss the
Russian economy’s American-led post-Cold War reconfiguration, which evolved
along lines pleasing to the Chicago School of true-believing free-market
capitalists, he showed in copious detail what Medvedev was alluding to in his
interview with Italy’s leading newspaper. This crash course in free market
economics had produced a harrowing increase in the nation’s poverty. The
Russian GDP declined by two-thirds from 1989 to 2000.The standard of living and
life expectancy fell while the number of people in poverty rose. Levels of
inequality grew as oligarchs took advantage of insider information to strip the
country of its assets, which they invested not in Russia, but in the U.S. Stock
Market. Billions of dollars poured out of the country along with a swelling
emigration of talented and educated young people who could see no future for
themselves there.
Revisiting the Russian experience of the
1990s, Medvedev cited the social consequences of these terrible years as the
main reason for Putin’s popularity in Russia today. After ten years of Western
democratic tutelage, the country had fallen apart. Medvedev credited Putin for
reviving Russia and returning it to great power status. The charges made
against him in the Western media, likening his government to the murderous
tyranny of Stalin, Medvedev dismissed as a complete misreading of Russian
history. He had lived under both these leaders. There was no comparison between
them. Russia was a controlled society, to be sure, but Putin did not preside
over its complex political system as a dictator.
Buoyed by high personal prestige
nationwide, Putin had the support of the Russian people in the Ukraine
intervention. It can be deduced from Medvedev’s interview that they had
accepted Putin’s two-fold reasoning for Russia’s actions. First, for the
Russians, the U.S.-NATO de facto alliance with Ukraine constituted an
existential threat, made even more dangerous by the inclusion of Neo-nazi radicals anti-Russian elements in that country’s military forces. Beginning
with the summit meeting of 2008 in Bucharest, the George W. Bush administration
pushed for Ukraine and Georgia to become members of NATO, by definition and
continued practice an anti-Russian alliance.
Thereafter, the march of events in that
part of the world had been in one direction leading on November 10, 2021, to
the U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership. This agreement outlined a
process for that country’s integration into the European Union and NATO.
Indeed, the military success of Ukraine against Russia reveals the large scope
of the ceaseless NATO training program. From the Kremlin’s perspective an
invasion became necessary to prevent an even more lethal threat from materializing
on its doorstep.
In the aftermath of the Charter’s
promulgation and USA’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s concerns, foreign
minister Sergey Lavrov declared that his country had reached its “boiling
point.” Even these blunt words failed to impress policy makers in
Washington. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a blunt declaration of
his own about Ukraine’s right to choose its own foreign policy and to apply for
membership in NATO if it wanted to, disregarding the practical inapplicability
of this high-minded principle to Canada or Mexico should either of those
nations discover their right to enter into a military alliance with Russia or
China. Russia’s subsequent mobilization of troops on the Ukraine border
prompted more bluntness from Blinken: “There is no change. There will be no
change.”
That which would not change in essence
concerned the Wolfowitz Doctrine. The American cause in Ukraine descends from
this doctrine. Its proclaimed purpose is the focal point in the second part of
Putin’s reasoning about Ukraine.
As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz authored the
1992 Defense Policy Guidance memorandum. This seminal foreign policy document
called for the maintenance of American supremacy in the post-Cold War era. No
rival superpower would be permitted to emerge. The unipolar domination of the
United States would be maintained in perpetuity. The Democrats did not demur.
During the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
announced that the United States enjoyed a unique status in the world as the
indispensable nation. Preserving U.S. economic and military primacy would enjoy
bipartisan favor.
That Putin had uppermost in mind
concerns about the credo of American supremacism became evident on February 4,
2022, when he and China’s President Xi Jinping issued their Joint Statement on
New Era International Relations and Sustainable Development. They declared that
instead of the U.S. hegemony, the U.N. Charter would be a better foundation for
international relations. In short, the unipolar moment of which Medvedev would
speak a month later, should pass into history.
The danger of the present crisis with
Russia in Ukraine and the one to come with China in Taiwan involves the way all
the principal powers envisage themselves facing existential threats. For the
Russians and the Chinese, the immediate issues at stake are territorial, for
the Americans, their global hegemony. The rules-based order of which the Biden
administration speaks in defense of its Ukraine policy is the one we have
devised and defended since the Bretton Woods financial conference of July 1944.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine takes its place as one of the many appendices and
codicils of the American Century mentality that assumed tangible institutional
form with the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank
along with the investment and military support systems of the Marshall Plan and
NATO.
All that panoply of American power now
confronts its first direct and forthrightly stated challenge since the end of
the Cold War. How to face it? The USA could continue to stoke the war in Ukraine
with money, arms, and economic sanctions while hoping that their direct
involvement can be avoided. Given their multifarious involvement already, the fog
of war greatly reduces the chances of success in keeping themselves clear of the
actual fighting. In the protracted war now envisaged, clear-eyed restraint
holding out for long on either side would be an unsafe bet. A negotiated
settlement would be a rational step, but powers imagining themselves to be in
dubious battle on the plains of Heaven seldom think of compromise until all the
alternatives are exhausted. These alternatives include nuclear weapons
exchanges.
With the perpetuation of the American
hegemony as their core issue in Ukraine and the fundamental motive for the Biden
administration’s four-alarm-fire response to the Putin challenge, it behooves them as a nation to look candidly at the policy they are defending. The USA are not
there to save the Ukrainian people from death or Ukraine from destruction, two
objectives most effectively reached by the propaganda that they want to end the war as quickly as
possible, instead of by perpetuating it as they are doing. As a nice bonus for Washington's side, profits are up for the defense corporations, which must feel ennobled
by their assistance to a Ukrainian cause all but universally blessed by the
mass media system.
Outside the United States, however, the
international reaction to the Washington-inspired economic sanctions against
Russia provides a glimpse of the division in the world over the rule we are
defending. Even in the NATO countries beneath the level of officialdom,
resistance to the sanctions mounts over fears of economic hardship for European
populations. Prices for gas and food are rising while incomes remain stagnant
or decline, with much worse trends envisaged for the near term as the sanctions
take full effect. For a growing number of Europeans, the full cost of
membership in NATO is already too high.
Beyond Europe, the reaction to the
Ukraine crisis favors Putin partly because the nations of the Global South know
that they will be the most vulnerable to the ill effects of the sanctions
leveled against Russia and we all know the danger that the USA represents, as we have tasted it with the dicatorships and financial oppresion. Vivid recollections of Western imperialism in
the non-white nations have a deadening effect on their reception of the NATO
narrative about its irenic and philanthropic purposes. The NATO wars recently
fought in Serbia, Iraq, and Libya have the same effect.
That Africa, Latin America, and Asia
generally have not signed on to the economic sanctions suggests that the war in
Ukraine has become a litmus test for the thesis of Pankaj Mishra in The
Age of Anger: A History of the Present. He portrays a world seething with resentment and
hatred due to the humiliation of peoples and cultures deprived of power-elite
protections. The most visible evidence of the global emergency that he
describes consists of worsening income inequality and environmental
degradation. The rules-based order for which we are fighting as arms-supplying
proxies in Ukraine lacks a moral basis and requires a thorough overhaul.
By persisting with their current Ukraine
policy, Washingtont can hope that this time, unlike all the other times since Woodrow
Wilson set the United States on the path to make the world safe for democracy,
a savage war will be something other than a slaughtering pen put to the service
of what Thorstein Veblen liked to call “the good old plan.” He meant the
securing, maintaining, and extending of his country's control over the
territories, markets, and resources of the world. This root-and-branch
criticism of American foreign policy comes in its most developed form from two
of their greatest historians, Charles Austin Beard and William Appleman Williams
whose work merits reconsideration today as Americans should try to wean themselves from and oppressive empire
as a way of life.
Washington cares less about Ukrainian independence and sovereignty than
Russia. Its primary interest in the territory is its location right next
to Russia; its other interests lie in the resources and markets a Ukraine under
US influence offers. Of course, the latter also helps explain Russia’s
determination not to let NATO assimilate Kyiv and the country it is the capitol
of. If Washington was truly interested in the independence of the
Ukrainian people, it would call for a resolution granting autonomy to the
eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, where a war for that region’s secession from
Ukraine has been waging since at least 2014 when the US/NATO sponsored color
rebellion overthrew the elected government in Kiev. It is that US-leaning
government that Washington wants to preserve; a government first installed by
US and NATO intelligence that may represent Ukrainian hopes, but certainly does
not represent Ukrainian independence. Only the Ukrainian people can
determine that and their voice is both muffled and mixed. Democratic
socialists, unabashed capitalists looking towards the EU, families with old
money stolen from the people after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
fascists whose legacy includes killing thousands of Jews and collaborating
militarily with the Nazis, and millions of workers and farmers—these are the
people of Ukraine. In my mind it is the last demographic which should
have the greatest say in their nation’s future. However, if the rest of
the world is any indication, their voice is the last to be heard.
The world watches as the squabble between US and Russia heats up.
Russia moves troops around its territory. Washington insists Moscow has no
right to move those troops near Russia’s border with Ukraine. The
Pentagon is moving some of its forces closer to Russia’s borders: into Poland,
Latvia, Lithuania among others. Meanwhile, Kyiv continues to take its
orders from Washington—which helped create the current political reality there
when it openly intervened in the electoral process in 2014 as part of its
expansion eastward via NATO after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The US conveniently insists that Cold War-style regions of influence are a
relic of the past and that countries should be able to choose their own
alliances. In other words, the US should be able to expand its empire wherever
it wishes. Moscow, for obvious reasons, disagrees. The current
debate over Ukraine is not about freedom for the Ukrainian people, but also
about Moscow expanding its influence into Europe at Washington’s expense.
A prime example of this struggle is the Nordeast 2 natural gas line that
enables Russian energy firms to transport and sell their resource to Germany
and other European nations at a much cheaper rate than US energy firms can sell
their product in the same markets.
Then there’s NATO. The fact of its continued existence reveals
much about its true intent. NATO is a tool of US empire; a military means to
keep the nations in the alliance under D.C.’s dominion. Like the Monroe
Doctrine is unofficially to Latin America, NATO is to Europe.
Masquerading as a benevolent protector and equal alliance of nations, its true
purpose is to engage other capitalist nations in Washington’s pursuit of
hegemony. While Washington continues to pretend that NATO exists to
defend freedoms that only the United States can dispense, NATO continues to be
part of the US empire’s armed wing. This is truer now than at any time
since the 1980s, when the Reagan White House moved nuclear missiles into Europe
despite massive protests.
In the world of imperial politics, Russia has two very legitimate
points—NATO needs to end its expansion and Russia has every right to move its
troops around its territory and host war games anywhere on its
territories. After all, not only does the US have its military deployed
in hundreds of countries around the world, it also hosts war games in countries
that border its top two rivals—Russia and China. Furthermore, many of the
troops deployed in Europe are there in part to intimidate Russia. Since
Washington has so far refused to either stop NATO expansion or pull back its
missiles and other armaments from targeting Russia, Moscow is threatening to
place some of its missiles in Cuba and Venezuela.
A truce should be agreed to that leaves all
forces in place while the warring sides and their sponsors negotiate an end to
the armed conflict. The motivation for this war resides in the desire to
control resources and territory, directly and otherwise. Those Ukrainians
desiring independence from Russia are seeing that desire being manipulated by
Washington and local politicians with their own designs. Those desiring
independence from the Kiev's government are experiencing a similar scenario.
The longer the war continues, the more it will be influenced by Washington. And the
more blood will be spilled, in vain. Because in the end, there will be either a division or an endless internal conflict. If not orld War III
From the first day that Russia succombed to Washington's trap on February 24th, I have worried about the trajectories of the
Ukraine War, the risks and effects of various policy moves by the engaged antagonistic
political actors to achieve their ends. I have also felt that a better
understanding emerges if we recognize the plural and complex character of four
encounters—on the battlefields pitting Russian aggressors against Ukrainian
resisters, inside Ukraine as various dangerous Neo-nazi elements struggle for
control; in the geopolitical matrix by which the U.S. is intent on humiliating Russia
by shattering its will and exposing its weaknesses as a challenger of U.S.
global primacy, while Russia is determined to regain control over its borders
and push back against NATO influence around its territory; and, finally, in
cyberspace whereby war-mongering propaganda, fake news, and truth have
become indistinguishable for the Western public, as they all come from the same
sources: Washington and Kiev. The overall effect of such an inflammatory
information and malicious exaggerations is to prolong the killing and heighten
the strategic stakes for the USA, and given the horrifying aspects of the
Ukraine Crisis making the conflicts unfit for diplomatic resolution.
In light of this mélange of
considerations how can a mere human being hope to achieve a clearer
understanding of what is happening, what are the relative risks, and what could
yet be done to end the destruction, to avoid any further deaths and safeguard
humanity from present risks of escalation to a wider war, possibly fought with
nuclear weapons? A first step in the right direction is to pronounce that the
ideological silos of both extreme left and right slant policy advocacy toward
extremism, cause confusion, and to the extent influence is exerted, the effect
is confound the search for viable and humane modes of deescalation. Extremist
policy vectors are unsatisfactory cognitively, normatively, and prudentially.
It is clear for those who know history
and USA’s will of dominating the world, that the Ukraine Crisis as essentially
an outcome of inflated post-Cold War global imperial overreach orchestrated by
the U.S., manifesting itself by way of neoliberal globalization in close
conjunction with the projection of military dominance on a planetary scale.
However, the great majority, which
enjoys far greater access to elite circles of government and media than independent
media, “explains” the Ukraine Crisis as an essentially “evil plot by a Russian
autocrat to destroy sanctity of the territorial rights of a sovereign state,
violating the most basic rule of a state-centric world order, and mounting an
unacceptable challenge to the exclusive global responsibilities of the West, led
by the U.S., to uphold security throughout the world in accord with democratic
values and humanitarian principles”. Oblivious to the geopolitical storm clouds
of a wider war that unleashes nuclear weapons.
In my view, silos of thought are not
helpful guidelines for prescriptive or normative approaches to the various
elements at play, and a more useful understanding comes from focusing on the
debates, perspectives, and shortcomings in the gray zones where ‘group think’
and special interests exert a decisive influence in shaping the worldview of
advisors and leaders. In this respect, it is important to assess the degree to
which foreign policy elites in the geopolitical “West”, especially the U.S.,
are responsive to the priorities and justifications put forward by the
military-industrial-intelligence-congressional-think tank-media complex (MICTIM),
and how its impacts relate to degrees of engagement and detachment from various
conflicts, and yet need to convince enough of the citizenry to lend support
depends on rationalizing wars by referencing the evil and menace of the other,
and in this case reviving Cold War memories of Russia as a menacing enemy of
all that the transatlantic alliance stands for. To this extent there is a sharp
distinction between the so called “autocratic” Russia and “democratic” U.S. As
notoriously acknowledged in the 2002 Report of the neocon Project for a New
American Century, despite the strength of MICTIM it cannot make war without a
high level of societal support. The citizenry needs to be mobilized by being
made fearful, angry, hostile, and confident enough to bear the costs and risks of
war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union as its necessary enemy this
would require ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to be depicted as a strategic threat as well
as an evil, criminal act.
Obviously, Russian induced aggression
against Ukraine was not itself a direct enough assault on the U.S. homeland to
be that new Pearl Harbor event, which for two decades 9/11 performed as the
demonic actor in this geopolitical theater of the absurd. Attacking Ukraine was
sufficiently indirect and distant from the homeland and posed no obvious
security threat to the U.S. Yet Washington labelled it as “provocative” in
other ways useful for the center-right nexus of foreign policy advisors in the
White House. It could be credibly cast as a barbaric attack on a white
Christian nation (by a Christian nation, nonetheless) that was used to arouse feelings of identification and induce an
outpouring of humanitarian sympathies sufficient to support immediate “diplomatic”
of Ukrainian sovereign rights and the demonization of Putin by Biden and the
media. This was in the very early phase. Soon the public “restrained engagement
with Ukrainian resistance” intensified as the propaganda against Russian “atrocities”
mounted and the strategic stakes attached to the political outcome rose.
Most relevantly, Ukrainian Azov militias
proved more formidable than expected, and it began to be believed that in the
course of helping Ukraine avoid being overrun by its “gigantic” Russian
neighbor, the OTAN could solidify its global dominance that was attained back
in 1992 when the Cold War ended. Not surprisingly at this point that the
parameters changed, the U.S. began to increase the extent of its involvement,
not primarily for the sake of Ukraine, but to push back against this Russian
challenge, and indirectly message China to lie low or else. Concerns about
underscoring geopolitical primacy took precedence over safeguarding Ukraine.
Nothing less than the legacy of the Cold War was at stake, whose aftermath was
characterized by the United States as the self-anointed unipolar architect of
world order. It is this shift of emphasis that is hidden beneath the current
attachment by MICTIM to ‘a victory scenario’ and the notable silence of the
leadership in Washington about framing ‘a peace scenario’ as if diplomacy was
either futile, unnecessary, and undesirable. Futile because Moscow was
allegedly unresponsive, unnecessary because the risks associated with
inflicting defeat of Russia worth taking, undesirable because ending the war on
Ukrainian soil too soon would deprive the U.S. of the major geopolitical
victory that Washington seeks and believes within its grasp.
This is an accurate account of why there
is no effort being made to stop the killing as leading moral authority figures
such as the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres and Pope Francis have
urged without generating a peace-oriented counterforce.
This discouraging portrayal of the global
scene when it comes to the agendas relating to war/peace, leaves the future
dependent on civil society activism, a calling of accounts from below.
Remembering that the political leaders of the victorious states in World War II
agreed before the guns went silent that there was no point establishing a UN
which had an effective normative mandate and sufficient material capabilities
to implement the Charter against the world’s most powerful states. It did not
hide this unseemly institutional modesty, but endowed this geopolitical right
of exception with normative authority by giving the five permanent members of
the Security Council a virtually unrestricted authority to veto any decision
of the only body in the entire UN system than could decide rather
than recommend or advise.
True, the International Court of Justice can render decisions, but its
jurisdiction is limited to voluntary acceptance by states in conflict and
although its decisions are subject to implementation if the Security Council
can muster a consensus. Otherwise decisions by the World Court can be ignored
or nullified without adverse consequences.
The Ukraine Crisis highlights the many
fragilities of world order at a time when geopolitical alignments are in flux,
with Russia challenging USA’s supremacy, China rising as the biggest financial world
game player, and the U.S. struggling to maintain the status quo it has been
losing since 2001.
Such circumstances are dangerously
diverting attention of leaders and publics from Israel's recurrent crimes in Palestine. As well as from the monumental tasks of
achieving food and energy security at a time of the menacing ecological
instabilities associated with climate change. For everyone knows that in case
that the US pushes NATO far enough, the World will be facing a global nuclear that
could erase us all.
The Russia-Ukraine war has quickly turned into a global conflict. As I’ve
already said, 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 maybe
Brasil 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.
Due to Washington’s aggressive intervention within Ukraine through Azov
and other militias and its approach to Finland and Sweden in order to convince
them to join NATO , 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, 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 – for
the moment, lack a cohesive narrative because of the absence of a leader, such as
Brasil. 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.
US previous unlawful 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 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, unless there
is a military putsch to push the war further. The latter’s challenge, however,
is whether it will be able to orchestrate a sustainable paradigm shift under
current USA’s pressures and sanctions.
The Kremlin believes so.
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…
In 1941 the US froze Japanese economic assets and squeezed its oil
supplies in an effort to prevent it from undertaking further territorial
expansion. In the event, these acts of deterrence were spectacularly
counter-productive and led to Japan launching its surprise attack on Pearl Harbour.
Forty years later the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein faced a somewhat
similar choice: either to give up his territorial ambitions in Kuwait or launch
a surprise invasion, which was to have predictably disastrous results for
himself and Iraq.
These two gigantic gambles have a common feature in that by any rational
calculation they were probably going to fail, but they still happened,
propelled by hubris, misinformation and the perpetrators’ belief that they
could not retreat.
Much the same cataclysmic misjudgment took place on 24 February
when Vladimir Putin invaded
Ukraine, having convinced himself
that his recently modernised army would face little political and military
resistance. He soon learned how wrong he was, but Japanese, Iraqi and Russian
leaders are not alone in overplaying their hand when they believe that they
hold winning cards.
Brimming with overconfidence after Putin’s failures, Washington, London
and Kyiv are now in the process of switching places with Moscow when it comes
to expectations of military victory, though nobody seems to know what would
constitute a victory. Would this mean Russia returning to pre-February lines,
its total eviction from Ukraine or regime change in Moscow?
NATO politicians and media are in full 1914 mode as they report a
succession of Russian humiliations. These upbeat reports are at odds with the
caution of top American intelligence officials speaking in Washington this week
about the future course of the war. Their wariness was in sharp contrast to the
cavalier approach of politicians and media pundits welcoming a wider war. The
director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told politicians that Putin is
preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine and has not abandoned his
original goals, though he will have to escalate the war to achieve them.
“The current trend increases the likelihood that President Putin will
turn to more drastic means, including imposing martial law, reorientating
industrial production or potentially escalatory military action… as the
conflict drags on or he perceives that Russia is losing in Ukraine,” Haines
said.
American intelligence chiefs are largely aware of reports from Russia
suggesting that elements of the army and security services do not blame Putin
for going to war, but they do blame him for not waging a total war.
As far as I know, Russia’s military believes that limiting the war’s
initial goals is a serious error. They now argue that Russia is not fighting
Ukraine, but Nato. Senior officers have therefore concluded that the Western
alliance is fighting all out (through the supply of increasingly sophisticated
weaponry) while its own forces demand all-out war, including mobilisation.
These may be only hints of what is going on in the Russian elite, but
they do lend support to one largely ignored but conceivable outcomes of Putin’s
failure as a warlord. Putsches usually succeed because they are unexpected. If a
putsche against him did occur it would well be carried out by those who claim
to be more capable of waging war than Putin and not by some pro-Western figure
willing to make peace.
One should not rule out a fully mobilised Russia putting 800,000
soldiers into the field instead of the inadequate 150,000 or so with which it
tried to conquer Ukraine. A key feature of Russian failure has been lack of infantry.
Those who erroneously consider bellicose rhetoric about regime change in
Moscow or permanently weakening Russia, may consider that Putin will only
authorise the use of nuclear weapons if he perceived an existential threat to
the Russian state.
“Mission creep” from a policy of defending Ukraine to one of defeating Russia has been going on since the beginning
of the war, but lately it has become more of Washington’s “mission gallop”. Europe’s and USA’s media and
the public are blithe about this happening or are urging on the shift towards
direct military action to take place at an even faster pace.
Arms-limitation treaties, once lauded for averting the risk of nuclear
war, are discarded as if they were irrelevant museum pieces. Dominic Cummings,
the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, skewers this reversal in goals by
governments, media and pundits who previously denounced as a Putin apologist
anybody taking seriously the Kremlin’s claim that the United States and Nato
are using Ukraine to destroy Russian power. But three months on, disbelieving
in this second policy objective shows again that “you are a Putin apologist”.
Remembering Pearl Harbour, one must bear in mind that one of the golden
rules of politics: given that nuclear issues aren’t taken seriously never
assume anything [else] is. The reverse applies and it is frightening that two
governments of sloganeers such as British and American with such a record of
blundering should be deciding issues of nuclear peace and war.
In expanding their war aims, the US and the Nato powers are doing
Ukrainians no favours, but they are dooming them to living in an arena where
outside powers fight each other over issues that have nothing to do with
Ukraine. This was the fate of Yugoslavia and Syria after 2011, producing
endless war and turning half the population into refugees.
The bloody stalemate in Syria could be ignored by the rest of the world
because in the eyes of Americans and Europeans Syrian lives don’t really
matter, do they? However, the same is not true of Ukraine because of it is an European
country in a strategic position and as vital supplier of foodstuffs and raw
materials. Nato would be unlikely to allow the continuation of the Russian
blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. Russia would be likely to make attacks
on western Ukraine to impede the flow of Nato weapons and supplies. Military
escalation will inevitably have a momentum of its own.
The international atmosphere today is close to 1914 with nations on the
march, but without having much idea what they are marching towards. During the
Great War more than a century ago, decisions affecting the lives of tens of
millions of people were taken by nincompoops like Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar
Nicholas II, but are we are much better off with leaders as feeble as Joe Biden
or as frivolous as Boris Johnson?
I was fascinated to discover that there is strong evidence that HIV/Aids
was first transmitted from chimpanzees to humans during the First World War,
far earlier than I had imagined. According to this excellent radio documentary, it happened in about 1916 in the rain forest of south east Cameroon as
a bizarre consequence of the First World War.
Cameroon had been a German colony which was conquered by the allies
using locally raised African troops as infantry. These soldiers, unlike the
officers who got a litre of wine a day in addition to other foodstuffs, were
ill-fed and had to hunt their own food – what would now be called bushmeat.
This meant shooting with their rifles infected chimpanzees, whom local people
had left alone because they are dangerous to hunt with bows and arrows and
spears.
But the butchering of the chimpanzees appears to have led one soldier
from the Congo becoming infected with HIV/Aids and taking it home to the
Kinshasa where it became endemic, though it took half a century or more for the
virus to spread to the rest of the world.
The story is interesting in itself and I had never heard it before. But
it is also a sort of parable about the unintended but deadly consequences of
the chaos of war. This is one of the points of my main piece about the
unpredictability of the conflict in Ukraine. Of course, the First World War
also produced the Spanish flu pandemic which first spread through US army
training camps where raw recruits from the countryside without immunity were
crammed together.
The illness was quite unfairly called “Spanish” flu because the Spanish,
in contrast to the combatants in the war, did not censor accounts of its lethal
impact on their country. HIV/Aids is estimated to have killed 30 million people
during the epidemic, compared to 15 million killed by Covid-19.
News from Ukraine tends to be either over-covered or under-covered by
the media. The over-covered news is mostly propaganda; even the truth is usually
selective and it is impossible for the public to know if some skirmish is
typical or atypical of the way the war is going. Does a Ukrainian success here
or a Russian retreat mean one side or the other is winning or is there a
stalemate?
Due to bias and censorship, crucial news about the war is often lacking
– such as what the Russian security elite are thinking about Putin’s
performance as a war leader – simply because reliable information is difficult
to obtain.
But some important facts about the war are concealed simply because they
are lost in the great torrent of information that pours out of Ukraine and its
neighbours and the propaganda itself, that comes from Kiev and Washington
officials.
As to the press, nobody takes the time and patience to sample it all and
detect the nuggets amid the repetitious and the dross.
It is a pity. If not shameful and dangerous. Very dangerous, indeed.
As part of his proposal for the latest aid package to Ukraine, President Joe Biden is asking lawmakers for the authority to formally confiscate the assets of sanctioned
oligarchs to pay to “remedy the harm Russia caused … and help build Ukraine.”
The House has already passed a bill urging Biden to sell the assets, but it didn’t specifically give him the authority to do so.
That he has gone to Congress to get permission indicates that his
lawyers believe, as do I, that current law permits only freezing, and not selling, foreign property in the course of an
international crisis.
I’ve studied and practiced international
law for several decades
and advised the departments of State and Defense on issues like this one. The idea of forcing Russia to pay
reparations for the harm to Ukraine has obvious appeal. But the U.S. needs to comply with constitutional and international law
when it does so.
You might ask what the difference is between seizing or freezing property – forbidding anyone to dispose of or use an asset or take income
from it – and confiscating it.
Freezing destroys the economic benefits of ownership. But the owner at least retains the
hope that, when the conflict is over and the freeze order ends, the property –
or its equivalent in money – will return. Confiscation
means selling off the property and giving the proceeds, along with any cash
seized, to a designated beneficiary – in this case, people acting on behalf of
Ukraine.
Since then, the U.S. has frequently used the power to seize assets
belonging to foreign individuals or nations as an economic sanction to punish
what it considers bad behavior. For example, after Iran stormed and seized the
American embassy in Tehran, the U.S. government seized
billions of dollars in Iranian assets in the U.S, including
cash and property. The U.S. has also frozen
assets of Venezuela and the Taliban over ties to terrorism and Russian
individuals considered responsible for human rights violations, thanks to
the Magnitsky Act.
In all these cases, the United States held on to the foreign property
rather than sell it off. In some cases, it used the seized property as a
bargaining chip toward a future settlement. In 2016, the Obama administration
famously returned US$400 million to Iran that the U.S. had seized after the embassy siege in 1979 –
delivering stacks of Swiss francs stuffed inside a Boeing 737. In other cases, the assets remain under government control, administered
by an office of the U.S. Treasury, in hope that eventually some compromise can
be reached.
A fundamental principle of justice says those who cause harm while
breaking the law should pay.
In international law, we call this “reparations.” As the United Nations puts it, “Adequate, effective
and prompt reparation is intended to promote justice by redressing gross
violations of international human rights law or serious violations of
international humanitarian law.”
In recent history, victors have often forced reparations on the losers
of war – as was the case following both World War I and
World War II – especially when they
are deemed responsible for massive death and ruin.
So it makes sense that so many scholars, lawmakers and others would
argue that the regime of Vladimir Putin and those who benefit from his rule
should help pay for it.
Another is political. Confiscating assets takes away important
bargaining chips in any future
negotiations, as they have been with Iran and other countries.
The question then becomes what that legislation should look like to
avoid running afoul of international law and the U.S. Constitution. There still
seem to be several limitations on what Congress can do.
For example, the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantees due
process before the government
can confiscate a private citizen’s property. But does this apply to property in
the U.S. that belongs to a foreign citizen? The answer
seems to be yes, at least according to two SupremeCourt cases.
Selling off Russian state property such as central bank assets, creates
other problems. International
law provides a certain degree of immunity from confiscation to foreign nations
and their assets overseas. Outside of wartime,
confiscation of state property, including U.S. deposits of Russia’s central
bank, runs up against these
challenges.
A case currently before the International Court of Justice will
decide whether the United States violated this rule when it used funds from frozen Iranian central bank deposits to
compensate people who had won a default judgment from Iran for supporting terrorists.
[More than 150,000 readers get one of The Conversation’s informative
newsletters. Join the list today.]
So, yes, I believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is outrageous and
demands a response. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. and other countries should ride
roughshod over international law and the U.S. Constitution to do so. Congress should be able to craft a law that allows some assets to be
confiscated without violating due process or international law.
I predict that disregarding these issues will likely produce
embarrassing judicial setbacks that will make it harder to help Ukraine down
the road.