USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Washington's Geopolitical War XI

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