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

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: A New World Order in the Horizon? V

 

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…

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

 Israel executed Shireen because she had a voice and she was heard. Justice for her! 

Why has the United States so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war?

And why has it so regularly and brutally gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many coup d'états and wars on this planet as far as I can remember, increasingly, since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001?

Those with some history knowledge might echo the conclusion reached more than a century ago by radical social critic Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the state” or recall the ancient warnings of the USA's founders like James Madison that democracy dies not in darkness, but in the ghastly light thrown by too many bombs bursting in air for far too long.

In  the early eighties, when I began covering international conflicts, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Ukraine would, of course, have been treated as a civil war between Soviet republics. In the context of the Cold War, the U.S. certainly wouldn’t have risked openly sending billions of dollars in weaponry directly to Ukraine to “weaken” Russia. Back then, such obvious interference in a conflict between the USSR and Ukraine would have simply been an open (instead of covered) act of war. (Of course, even more ominously, back then, Ukraine also had nuclear weapons on its soil.)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, everything changed. The Soviet sphere of influence gradually became the U.S. and NATO sphere of influence, despite the promises and negotiations with Moscow. Nobody asked Russia whether it truly cared, since that country was in serious decline, under the "leadership" of the feeble Yeltsin. Soon enough, even former Soviet republics on its doorstep became Washington's ground of meddling in and selling arms to, no matter the Russian warnings about “red lines” vis-à-vis inviting Ukraine to join NATO. And yet here we are, with an awful war in Ukraine on our hands, as the UA leads Europe in sending weapons to Ukraine, including Javelin and Stinger missiles and artillery, while promoting some form of future victory, however costly, for Ukrainians, and Europeans.

Here’s what I wonder: Why in this century has the USA, the self-proclaimed “leader of the free world” (as they used to say in the days of the first Cold War and took the bad habit of saying), also become the leader in promoting global warfare?

And why don’t more Americans see a contradiction in that reality?

There may be at least five answers, however partial, to those questions:  First and above all, war is — even if so many Americans don’t normally think of it that way — immensely profitable. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. military-industrial complex recognized a giant business opportunity. During the Cold War, the world’s biggest arms merchants were the U.S. and the USSR.  With the Soviet Union gone, so, too, was Wasington's main rival in selling arms everywhere. It was as if Jeff Bezos had witnessed the collapse of Walmart. Do you think he wouldn’t have taken advantage of the resulting retail vacuum?

Forget about the “peace dividends” Americans were promised then or downsizing the Pentagon budget in a major way. It was time for the big arms manufacturers to expand into markets that had long been dominated by the USSR.  Meanwhile, the ever-lasting blackmailed NATO "chose to" follow suit in its own fashion, expanding beyond the borders of a reunified Germany. Despite verbal promises to the contrary made to Soviet leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, it expanded into Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Romania, among other countries — that is, to the very borders of Russia itself, even as U.S. weapons contractors made a killing in supplying arms to such new NATO members. In the spirit of management guru Stephen Covey, it may have been a purely “win-win” situation for NATO, the U.S., and its merchants of death then, but it’s proven to be a distinctly lose-lose situation for Russia and now especially for Ukraine as the war there drags on and on, while the destruction only mounts.

* Second, when it comes to promoting war globally, consider the U.S. military’s structure and mission. How could it possibly return to anything like what, so long ago, was known as “isolationism” when it has at least 750 military bases scattered liberally on every continent except Antarctica? How could Washington not promote war in some fashion, when that unbelievably well-funded military’s mission is defined as projecting power globally across all “spectrums” of combat, including land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace? What could you expect when its budget equals those of the next 11 militaries on this planet combined or when the Pentagon quite literally divides the whole world into U.S. military commands headed by four-star generals and admirals, each one a Roman-style proconsul? How could you not imagine that Washington’s top officials believe the USS has a stake in conflicts everywhere under such circumstances? Such attitudes are an obvious product of such a structure and such a sense of armed global mission.

* Third, consider the power of the dominant narrative in Washington in these years. Despite the never-ending war-footing of the US, Americans are generally sold on the myth that they constitute "a high-minded nation desirous of peace". In a cartoonish fashion, they’re always the good guys and enemies, like Putin’s Russia now, uniquely evil. Conforming to and parroting this version of reality leads to career success, especially within the corporate-mainstream media.  As Chris Hedges once so memorably put it: “The [U.S.] press goes limp in front of the military.”  And those with the spine to challenge such a militarist narrative are demoted, ostracized, exiled, or even in rare cases imprisoned. Just ask whistleblowers and journalists like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, and Edward Snowden who have dared to challenge the American war story and paid a high price for it.

* Fourth, war both unifies and distracts. In this century, it has helped unify the American people, however briefly, as they were repeatedly reminded to “support our troops” as “heroes” in the fight against “global terror.” At the same time, it’s distracted them from the class war in their country, where the poor and working class (and, increasingly, a shrinking middle class as well) are most definitely losing out. As financier and billionaire Warren Buffett put the matter: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

* Fifth, wars, ranging from the Afghan and Iraq ones to the never-ending global "war on terror", including the present one in Ukraine, have served as distractions from another reality entirely: the USA's national decline in this century and its ever-greater political dysfunction. (Think Donald Trump, who didn’t make it to the White House by accident, but at least in part because disastrous wars helped pave the way for him.)

Americans often equate war itself with masculine potency. (Putting on “big boy pants” was the phrase used unironically by officials in George W. Bush’s administration to express their willingness to launch conflicts globally.) Yet by now, some of them do sense that they're witnessing a seemingly inexorable national decline. Exhibits include a rising number of mass shootings; mass death due to a poorly handled Covid-19 pandemic; massive drug-overdose deaths; increasing numbers of suicides, including among military veterans; and a growing mental-health crisisamong our young.

Political dysfunction feeds on and aggravates that decline, with Trumpism tapping into a reactionary nostalgia for a once “great America" that could be made “great again” — if the right people were put in their places, if not in their graves. Divisions and distractions serve to keep so many of us downtrodden and demobilized, desperate for a leader to ignite and unite us, even if it’s for a cause as shallow and false as the “stop the steal” Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

Despite the evidence of decline and dysfunction all around them, many Americans continue to take pride and comfort in the idea that the U.S. military remains the finest fighting force in all of history — a claim advanced by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, among so many other boosters.

The fact of the matter is that the USA is overly ambitious and malevolent, as well as often misguided and in denial when it comes to their flaws. An American once rejoinder to me an “empty stage” argument. Basically, he suggested that all the world’s a stage and, should the his country become too timid and abandon it, other far more dangerous actors could take their place, with everyone suffering. My response was that they should, at least, try to leave that stage in some fashion and see if they were missed. Wasn’t their own American stage ever big enough for them? 

Of course, officials in Washington and the Pentagon do like to imagine themselves as leading “the indispensable nation” and are generally unwilling to test any other possibilities.  Instead, like so many ham actors, all they want is to eternally mug and try to dominate every stage in sight.

In truth, from international point of view, the U.S. shouldn't be involved in eany war beyond its own frontiers and undoubtedly wouldn’t be if certain actors (corporate as well as individual) didn’t feel it was just so profitable. There could indeed be a wiser and more peaceful path forward for the US. But that can’t happen if the forces that profit from the status quo — where bellum (war) is never ante- or post- but simply ongoing — remain so powerful. The question is, of course, how to take the profits of every sort out of war and radically downsize their military (especially its overseas “footprint”), so that it truly becomes a force for “national security,” rather than international insecurity.

Most of all, Americans need to resist the seductiveness of war, because endless war and preparations for more of the same have been a leading cause of national decline.  One thing I know: Waving blue-and-yellow flags in solidarity with Ukraine and supporting “their” troops may feel good but it won’t make Americans good but worse. In fact, it will only contribute to ever more gruesome versions of war and hate around the world.

A striking feature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that, after so many increasingly dim years, it’s finally allowed USA’s war party to pose as the “good guys” for once in a life time. After decades of a calamitous “war on terror” and unmitigated disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and so many other places, not mentioning the dictatorships Washington sponsored in South America, Americans find themselves on the side of the underdog Ukrainians against that “genocidal” “war criminal” Vladimir Putin.  That such a reading of the present situation might be uncritical and reductively one-sided should (but doesn’t) go without saying. That it’s seductive because it feeds both American nationalism and narcissism, while furthering a mythology of redemptive violence, should be scary indeed.

Yes, it’s high time to call a halt to the Pentagon’s unending ham-fisted version of a world tour.  If only it were also time for Americans to try dreaming a different dream, a more pacific one of being perhaps a nation among equals. In the United States of this moment, even that is undoubtedly asking too much.

An American officer once said that when you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Unfortunately, when you choose the dark path of global dominance, you also choose a path of constant warfare and troubled times marked by the cruel risk of violent blowback.

Washington certainly wants to make Americans believe that it’s on the right side of history in this Ukraine moment. However, persistent warfare should never be confused with strength and certainly not with righteousness, especially on a planet haunted by a growing sense of impending doom. 

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Washington's & London's Warmongers

 

“Take a charitable view,” was the advice of Sir Wilmot Lewis, the veteran correspondent of The Times in Washington in the last century, “bearing in mind that every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must”.

His cynical words are particularly pertinent in times of war because it is then that governments have an unrivalled opportunity to do harm. They can wrap themselves in the national flag and denounce their critics as unpatriotic appeasers. Most dangerously, they can purport to be providing good judgement and competent administration despite a dismal track record of bungling and dishonesty in the handling of domestic crises far less complex than the demands of warfare.

A frightening example of this born-again bombast came this week when British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, made a speech at the Mansion House in London expressing enthusiasm for maximum war aims. “We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine,” she said, which would mean backing a Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake Crimea and the Russian-backed separatist republics in the Donbas. These are objectives that any Russian leader, regardless of whether or not Vladimir Putin remains in the Kremlin, is likely to resist.

“Britain has always stood up to bullies,” said Truss. “We have always been risk takers.” This is a rather serious misreading of British foreign policy, which historically has tended to be cautious and avoid risky leaps in the dark. Overall, Truss’s reduction of foreign policy to a series of triumphalist slogans could be set to music and take its place in an updated version of “Oh! What a Lovely War”.

But if the British Government’s actions in a military conflict – in which it is becoming more engaged by the day – is as inept as its performance in times of peace, then we face a dark and uncertain future. Evidence for this is not hard to find since on the same day that Truss was indulging in undiluted war euphoria, the High Court in London was issuing a judgment saying that the Government’s policy towards care homes in England in 2020 – alleged to have killed 20,000 inmates – was “irrational” and “unlawful”. The judges concluded that the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, had “failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-systematic transmission”.

This is probably a better example of recent British risk taking than anything Truss may have had in mind in lauding this approach as a national tradition. Wild-eyed boosterism followed by practical failure has been the motif of Boris Johnson’s government over the past three years.

Patent though this government’s failings have has been, one could take some comfort in the hope that its ability to do harm would be mitigated by its own incompetent grasp of the levers of power. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith famously said in 1777, downplaying the capacity of a poor government with bad policies to bring about national ruin.

However, an exception to the great economist’s rule occurs in wartime. Political leaders who have seen their schemes founder or prove ineffectual at home are suddenly taking decisions of life and death for thousands of people. They tend to revel in this new authority – however incapable they are of exercising it competently.

I suspect that successful politicians, more than most individuals, have an inner Napoleon who is always struggling to break free and send armies into battle. In so doing, their self-confidence differs markedly from the French emperor, who warned against preconceived ideas about what was happening, or going to happen, on the battlefield because such notions usually turned out to be wrong.

Vladimir Putin is one of many good examples of a leader whose belief in his own propaganda lured him into launching an invasion of Ukraine that could succeed only in the unlikely event of there being no Ukrainian resistance. Putin has tried to adjust to this reality which is so different from his expectations. At the beginning, he tried to wage a conventional war in Europe with inadequate Russian forces, still at their peacetime level of mobilisation because they were engaged only in his special military operation.

Yet Putin’s false optimism about his prospects for military victory cannot be attributed to his “isolation in the Kremlin”, or to the “blood-soaked traditions of Russian history”. This has been a common feature in most military conflicts that I have reported on – from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to the Nato intervention in Libya in 2011.

Most of these wars ended disastrously for those who started them because they did not understand that military conflicts have so many moving parts, seen and unseen, that their length and outcome cannot be predicted.

President George W Bush was pilloried for standing beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but this sense of premature accomplishment is common to most wars. The same is likely to be true of Ukraine because so many countries with divergent interests are now involved.

But there is another wild card that makes the Ukraine war even more dangerous. The decision-makers in wars really do matter, but the calibre of leadership in the White House and in Downing Street is at a historic low in all three cases.

The British Government has been hopping from scandal to scandal and failure to failure at home and is unlikely to perform better abroad. President Joe Biden appears to believe that this is a chance to win a smashing victory over Russia, but his war aims remain hazy, except for his blinded hatred for Russia.

The ballooning arrogant self-confidence of the Nato powers has led to them cavalierly dismissing as phoney the risk of Russia using tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. Well-publicised Russian missile tests are played down as mere sabre rattling, though the last time Putin rattled a sabre – by threatening to invade Ukraine – he did exactly that.

The low quality of the main leaders inside and outside Ukraine is significant because the war may soon enter a third and more violent phase. Because Vladimir Putin initially believed that he was not fighting a real war he has never carried out a full mobilisation. Shortage of infantry has been the abiding weakness of the Russian war effort during the first phase of the conflict.

The same is still true of the second phase of the war, which is being fought out in the Donbas. But, if that also fails, and backed by USA&Nato’s military Ukraine launches a counter-offensive, then Putin may have little choice but to declare a general mobilisation rather than face a defeat.

USA vs Peace in Korea: Is Biden building World War III in Europe and in Asia?

 

An end-of-war declaration would be an important step towards reducing the dire threat of war and opening the way to further accommodations… The best policy I think would be in the general spirit of the Sunshine policy: steps toward accommodation, relaxation of tensions, withdrawal of threats and provocations. – Noam Chomsky

Isn’t it a good prelude to avoid USA’s taking back the reins of South Korea sponsoring conservative Yoon Suk-yeol’s razor-thin 0.7% victory margin in South Korea’s March 9 presidential election, which was far from a public mandate for his much-touted hawkish foreign policy.

Yoon’s sharp rhetoric on a tougher stance toward North Korea–including repeated references to pre-emptive strikes against Pyongyang–is out of step with the South Korean electorate, the majority of whom want peace with the North. His foreign policy stance promises to force South Korea into the front lines of a new US-led Cold War. By doing his part to ensure that a state of tension is maintained in the Korean peninsula, Yoon is faithfully serving US strategic interests by placing the Korean nation at risk while enabling Washington to continue justifying its nearly eight-decade occupation of South Korea in order to secure its forward military position against China.

Five years after the ignominious end of the conservative Park administration, South Korea’s conservatives are back in power, a development that does not bode well for Korea or the rest of the world. Yoon’s controversial past, his lack of practical experience, and his hawkish views combine to form a dangerous political free radical in the game of brinkmanship that continues to be played out in the Korean Peninsula. Yoon lost no time in labeling Pyongyang as Seoul’s “main enemy,” marking a departure from his predecessor Moon Jae-in. Amplifying Yoon’s rhetoric, his foreign policy delegation to Washington has advocated for a policy of Complete, Verifiable and Irreversible Denuclearization (CVID) with respect to the North. The delegation also stressed South Korea’s commitment to the US strategy of containing China and advocated for the redeployment of US strategic assets such as nuclear-capable aircraft carriers, bombers and submarines to the Korean peninsula.

Unsurprisingly, Yoon’s hawkish pivot has been warmly welcomed by the Biden administration and the foreign policy elite in Washington, who believe his victory will give the US an upper hand in arm wrestling South Korea into its strategy of containing China. Conservative US news outlets lauded the “pro-US Yoon victory” and predicted that “South Korea’s hawkish new president will be good for the western alliance”, while emphasizing that Yoon’s victory signaled that “The time to reconstitute pressure on Pyongyang is now.”

Echoing this chorus, Philip Goldberg, the nominee for US ambassador to South Korea and former enforcer of UN sanctions against the North, stated that the United States should “resolutely pursue complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of “the rogue regime in North Korea”. However, Washington’s strategy of demanding concessions in the absence of meaningful assurances has only increased Pyongyang’s determination to acquire nuclear deterrence capability as a security guarantee against the US. Daniel DePetris observes that: The chances of Kim relinquishing his nuclear deterrent at this late stage in the game is somewhere between slim to none. No country has undergone such large opportunity costs over a period of decades to develop as many as 65 nuclear warheads, only to suddenly trade those weapons away in exchange for economic and political concessions and vague security guarantees.

Only last week, China, stressing that the additional US sanctions imposed on Pyongyang were only raising tensions, proposed a halt to the historically provocative annual US-South Korea military drills in exchange for the North’s suspension of ICBM and nuclear testing. The US rejected China’s proposal.

On March 31, South Korea and the United States upgraded their joint wartime operations plans to include a response to North Korean nuclear measures, and senior US, Japanese, and South Korean military leaders discussed trilateral cooperation, ostensibly to “deter the North’s threats”–a euphemism for the Biden administration’s priority of hemming in China. A majority of Koreans oppose such a provocative military alliance that would threaten regional peace and stability.

On April 14, under the pretext of deterring the North’s “aggression,” the US dispatched the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group to conduct bilateral operations with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force near the Korean Peninsula, marking the first time since 2017 that a US carrier group has been deployed to the waters between South Korea and Japan.

On April 18, the US and South Korea began their controversial annual joint military drills, in spite of the opposition of the majority of Koreans and over 350 US, South Korean, and international organizations who released a statement calling for their suspension. The drills, which mobilize considerable numbers of US troops and ordnance on the Korean Peninsula and simulate military engagement against the North, have historically served as a reliable means to increase regional tensions: In recent years, these war drills have been based on operation plans that reportedly include preemptive strikes and “decapitation measures” against the North Korean leadership. They also have involved the use of B-2 and B-52H bombers (which are designed to drop nuclear bombs) and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. While the United States and South Korea have called them defensive in nature, these military exercises have long been a trigger point for heightened military and political tensions on the Korean Peninsula, due to their scale and provocative nature.

Thus far, Yoon’s hawkish policies have failed to garner public support.  According to a series of recent polls conducted in 2021, over 70 percent of South Koreans do not regard the North as an enemy; 70 percent support an End of War declaration; 61 percent support relaxing sanctions on the North; and, 79 percent support peace with Pyongyang. This sentiment persists even among Yoon supporters, a majority of whom support a peace treaty, breaking with his rhetoric calling for a tougher stance toward North Korea.

While Yoon’s victory bodes well for Washington’s unrelenting campaign to drive Seoul into the front lines of its anti-China crusade, his stated policy stance of  “no” to North Korea and China and “yes to the US” will be easier said than done, not the least because of the far-ranging economic interdependence between South Korea and China. In 2021, China took in more than a quarter of all Korean exports, while the United States accounted for only 15 percent. According to a 2021 survey, Koreans remain unenthusiastic about America’s anti-China containment strategy, with a majority supporting a neutral stance in the US-China rivalry”.

Yoon’s refusal to engage with the North or to exert any degree of sovereignty vis-a-vis the US ensures that South Korea remains a semi-occupied subservient “force multiplier” existing primarily to serve Washington’s growing strategic interests in Northeast Asia.

The US itself, having waged a brutal war in the Korean peninsula that left millions dead, continues to block all attempts at reconciliation by the two Koreas, refusing to support constructive diplomacy, sign a peace treaty or even declare a symbolic end to the nearly eight-decade Korean war. Instead, Washington’s policies, and the limits they place on South Korean sovereignty and inter-Korean relations, ensure the maintenance of a permanent state of tension in the Korean Peninsula, providing the US with perpetual justification for its unprecedented seventy-seven year military occupation and political subjugation of the South.

The “North Korean threat” serves as a cover for Washington’s anti-China policy and its expanding military projection into Asia. In this context, Yoon’s victory is a component of a transnational hawkish pivot that threatens peace and stability in the Korean peninsula and all of Northeast Asia. In addition to the tensions Washington built in Europe on Ukrainian ground.

Does Biden want to go down in history as the American president responsible for World War III?