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

 

Interfering in another state is tricky business – so says the gutsy University of Chicago international relations scholar John Mearsheimer (The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities [2018]. It is tricky – and dangerous – and the exceptional nation, the US, may think pushing NATO (with its missile sites and troop placement) to Russia’s borders is benign. But another state – Russia – thinks it is threatening. Mearsheimer admits that great powers may follow “balance of power” logic, but they can also embrace “liberal hegemony.” When they do, “they may cause a lot of trouble for themselves and other states. The ongoing crisis over Ukraine is a case in point” (p. 171).

It sure is—and very few citizens in USA, Canada and NATO countries have a clue about what this crisis is about: they just assume, saturated in decades of various forms of anti-Russian propaganda, that the military operation launched by Russia on February 24^th was, pure and simple, the logical extension of an evil leader, Vladimer Putin. In other words, Ukraine is mere “worthy victim” – and the propaganda machine in the West don’t miss a chance to display images (often false) of the destruction of buildings and people by evil Putin and his military. Evidence is not necessary to substantiate any claims fed to us by the mass media. Images will do because they arouse emotions.  Putin is to blame; Zelensky is the n"oble defender of Ukrainian nationality".

According to the prevailing wisdom in NATO States, this crisis is largely the result of Russian aggression. President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, is bent on creating a greater Russia akin to the former Soviet Union, which means controlling the governments in its ‘near abroad’—its neighbouring states—including Ukraine, the Baltic states, and possibly other Eastern European countries. The coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych on February 22, 2014, provided Putin with a pretext for annexing Crimea and starting a war in eastern Ukraine. Bottomline: Putin as instigator. Blame him, and him alone!

Flatly, Mearsheimer states: “This account is false. The United States and its European allies are mainly responsible for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO expansion, the central element in a larger strategy to move all of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West” (p. 172). Mearsheimer claims that the West’s strategy was based on liberal principles – the “aim was to integrate Ukraine into the ‘security community’ that had developed in  western Europe during the Cold War and had been moving eastward since its conclusion. But the Russians were using a realist playbook. The major crisis that resulted left many Western leaders feeling blindsided” (ibid.). One wonders – really, could they have been that clueless or deluded?

Mearsheimer provides a helpful framework to see how the US and allies could rip Ukraine out of the Russian orbit: “NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and the Orange Revolution, which aimed at fostering democracy and Western values in Ukraine and thus presumably produce pro-Western leaders in Kiev” (p. 172). But Moscow was “deeply opposed to NATO enlargement.” In fact, Russian leaders believed that, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, NATO would not move an inch toward Russia’s borders. They believed that “no enlargement” had been promised, but were deceived by the Clinton administration.

Ordinary citizens probably have no understanding that, in eminent Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen’s analysis (in War with Russia: from Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate [2022], since the “end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington had treated post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation with inferior legitimate rights at home and abroad. The triumphalist, winner-take-all approach has been spearheaded by the expansion of NATO—accompanied by non-reciprocal zones of national security while excluding Moscow from Europe’s security systems. Early on, Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Georgia were Washington’s ‘great prize’” (p. 16).

With the Russian bear in miserable condition (it lost its cubs) through the 1990s—Solzhenitsyn thought his country at this time was living “literally amid ruins”–NATO expansion, in 1999, brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. The second component of the expansion occurred in 2004, which included Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltic countries. Russian leaders complained bitterly from the start.” The inept  Boris Yeltsin saw fire on the horizon when NATO bombed Serbia in 1995. “When NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders … The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe” (p. 172) Too weak to derail these developments, Russia could take small comfort that only the tiny Baltic countries shared their border.

But all hell broke loose at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, when Ukraine’s and Georgia’s membership came up for discussion. Both Germany and France had qualms, but the Bush administration wanted these countries inside their security zone. The final announcement proclaimed that Geogia and Ukraine were welcomed for membership. Putin, Mearsheimer maintained, “that admitting those two countries would represent a ‘direct threat’ to Russia. If anybody had any doubts about Russia’s seriousness regarding accepting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, the Russia-Georgia war in August 2008 should have dispelled those deluded thoughts.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, who was deeply committed to drawing his own country into the NATO circle, had first to resolve the disputes with two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin prevented this from occurring – and invaded Georgia, gaining control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Saakashvili was left in the lurch by the West. “Russia had made its point,” Mearsheimer observes, “yet NATO refused to give up on bringing Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance” (p. 173). We need to be reminded that the Georgian war was “financed, trained and minded by American funds and personnel” (Cohen, 2022, p. 187).

The EU expanded eastward. “Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the EU in 1995, and eight Central and Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined in May 2004 along with Cyprus and Malta. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007” (p. 174). These developments were a stick poke to the Russian bear’s eyes. This Eastern Partnership was perceived as hostile to their country’s interests. “Sergei Lavrov, complained bitterly that the EU was trying to create a “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe and hinted that it was engaging in ‘blackmail’” (ibid.). Who can deny that Moscow correctly sees EU membership as a “stalking horse for NATO enlargement” (ibid.)?

The final, and third, tool for “peeling Ukraine away from Russia was the effort to promote the Orange Revolution” (ibid.). The US and European allies endeavoured to foster social and political change in countries formerly under Soviet control. Essentially, the aim was to spread Western “values” and promote “liberal democracy” – efforts funded by NGOs and official governments. That sounds innocent enough: but it isn’t. The underlying geopolitical agenda was clear: to foment hostility to Russia and to execute the “final break with Moscow” and to “accelerate” Kiev’s membership in NATO (Cohen, 2022, p. 24). 

Now we enter the great quagmire of conflicting interpretations of the events of 2014. The fateful crisis began in late November 2013, when President Yanukovych “rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided instead to accept a Russian counteroffer” (p. 174). Over the next three months there were protests against the government, and on January 22, 2014, two protestors were killed. By mid-February one hundred more died. Hurriedly flown in, Western emissaries tried to resolve the crisis, so claims Mearsheimer, by striking a deal on February 21 that permitted Yanukovych to “stay in power until new elections were held sometime before year’s end” (p. 175).

But protesters didn’t permit him to stay in office—on February 22 Yanukovych fled to Russia. The new government in Kiev “was thoroughly pro-Western and anti-Russian. Moreover, the US government backed the  coup, although the full extent of its involvement is unknown” (ibid.). Perhaps – but we do know that the Maidan protests were “strong influenced by extreme nationalist and even semi-fascist street forces, turned violent” (Cohen [2022], p. 17). Snipers killed scores of protestors and policeman on Maidan Square in February 2014. The neo-fascist organization Right Sector (and its co-conspirators) played a key role in bringing to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime.

Cohen counters the prevalent narrative that Putin bribed and bullied Yanukovych to reject the “reckless provocation” of the EU proposal – forcing a “deeply divided country to choose between Russia and the West” (p. 17). Further, Cohen argues that the EU proposal would have imposed harsh measures on Ukraine and, significantly, “curtail longstanding and essential economic relations with Russia” (ibid.). There was nothing approaching benign in the EU’s proposal. Mearsheimer states that the US backed the coup , and the egregious “Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), for example, participated in anti-government demonstrations, while the  US ambassador in Kiev proclaimed after the coup that it was a ’day for the history books’” (p, 175). A day of infamy for lovers of a peaceable world order. Don’t ask me to “please, have a cookie or two.”

“A leaked transcript of phone conversation,” Mearsheimer tells us, “revealed that Nuland advocated regime change and wanted Arseniy (“Yats”) Yatsenyuk, who was pro-Western, to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. It is hardly surprising that Russians of all persuasions think Western provocateurs, especially the CIA, helped overthrow Yanukovych” (ibid.). “Fuck the EU”—Nuland’s vulgar rallying cry stills rings in our ears to this day. Cohen comments: “Europe’s leaders and Washington did not defend their own diplomatic accord. Yanukovych fled to Russia. Minority parliamentary parties representing Maidan and, predominantly, western Ukraine—among them Svoboda, an ultranationalist movement previously anathematized by the European Parliament as incompatible with European rulers—formed a new government” (p. 17). Ominously, Washington and Brussels “endorsed the coup and have supported the outcome ever since. Everything that followed, from Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the spread of rebellion in southeastern Ukraine to the civil war and Kiev’s ‘anti-terrorist operation,’ was triggered by the February coup” (p. 18).

What ordinary citizens do not understand, to say the least, is that the coup was cultivated by the US and allies, thus triggering Russian responses. And they do not understand that, from February 2014 until the present military conflict in Ukraine in 2022, that the West (including the Russophobic Canadian Liberal Party) have been training military in Ukraine and turning a knowing blind-eye to the neo-Nazi militia, who have played a key role in attacking Russians and everything “Russian” in the country: The “anti-terrorist” military campaign against its own citizens in Luhansk and Donetsk is the “essential factor escalating the crisis” (p. 18). Well-over 10,000 citizens have died; and millions of refugees created. The crisis cannot be laid at Putin’s feet.

The western press has blanked out accounts of events such as the “pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Odessa shortly later in 2014.” This action “reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II.” The Azov Battalion of 3,000 soldiers—a neo-fascist militia (as evidence by regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements)—has played a “major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war.” Most Canadian citizens would be astonished to hear this – that must be propaganda from the evil tyrant Putin. Sorry: it isn’t. Nor are the “storm troop-like assaults on gays, Roma, women feminists, elderly ethnic Russians, and other ‘impure’ citizens are wide-spread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine.”

The neo-fascist militia have also desecrated a sacred Holocaust gravesite in Ukraine – with legal authorities doing nothing in response. Most disturbingly, Kiev has systematically begun “rehabilitating and even memorializing leading Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms during World War II” (p. 180).

Mearsheimer presents the basic outline of Putin’s response to the coup. If Ukraine joined NATO, the Crimean port of Sevastopol would serve beautifully as a US/NATO military launching pad. The act of incorporating Crimea into Russia was “not difficult given that Russia already had thousands of troops at its naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Those forces were augmented by additional troops from Russia, many of them not in uniform. Crimea was an easy target because roughly 60 percent of the people living there were ethnic Russians, and most preferred to become part of Russia” (p. 175).

Putin, Mearsheimer informs us, “also put massive pressure on the Kiev government to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow. He made it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning society before allowing a Western stronghold to exist on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that end, he has supported the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine with weapons and covert troops, helping to push the country into civil war. He also maintained substantial ground forces on Russia’s border with Ukraine and threatened to invade if Kiev cracks down on the rebels. Finally, he has raised the price of gas Russia sells to Ukraine, demanded immediate remittance of overdue payments, and at one point even cut off the supply of gas to Ukraine …. Putin is playing hardball with Ukraine … “ (p. 176).

The realist Mearsheimer chides the US (and, indirectly its allies) that if they had a “rudimentary understanding of geopolitics should have been seen this coming” (ibid.). “The West was moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany have all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as an enormously important strategic buffer to Russia itself. No Russian leader would tolerate a former enemy’s military alliance moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government in Kiev that was determined to join that alliance” (ibid).

Why does the US and its obedient allies imagine that they can get away with these war-mongering actions? Reminding us of his own country’s Monroe Doctrine, Mearsheimer argues forcefully that the US does not tolerate for two minutes “distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere … “ (ibid.). Many critics have turned the tables on the US – inviting them to consider their reaction if China built an alliance and tried to install governments in Mexico and Canada.  What say thee, Anthony Blinken? What say thee, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland?

Russia has told the US and its allies time after time that they will not “tolerate NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia (the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and present conflict in Ukraine should make this clear). Let me finish with two brief 6conclusions from Mearsheimer. First, Western elites have a “flawed understanding of international politics” (p. 177). The US believes that “it is a benign hegemon that does not threaten Russia or any other country” (ibid.). One gags upon reading this nonsense. Second, the “grand scheme to turn Europe into a giant security community went awry over Ukraine, but the seeds of this disaster were sown in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began pushing for NATO expansion” (ibid.).

At this historical moment Putin and Russia are being fiercely and relentlessly demonized by corporate media because this “grand scheme” has been resolutely rejected and Washington & NATO countries are heaping vitriol on Russian actions and its people for rejecting their "exceptional gifts".  

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

 

The deepening current Ukraine Crisis is linked to the Russian military campaign that commenced on February 24, 2022, and has continued to ravage the country since, including inducing a refugee flow numbering several million who have voluntarily or involuntarily fled their country in search of a “Western dream” of a better life.

There is a broad consensus around Europe and the USA that such aggression is a criminal violation of international law, and while noting the irresponsible nature of NATO provocations, it is widely agreed, provides Russia with no legally or morally relevant excuse with respect to accountability for so violently encroaching on Ukrainian sovereign rights and territorial integrity.

At the same time, from the outset of these events there was much more limited international support for the American-led punitive response by NATO featuring harsh sanctions amounting to ‘economic warfare,’ shipment of weaponry to the beleaguered country, dehumanization of Putin and Russo-phobic propaganda, along with silence about recourse to diplomacy. In the background was the related internal struggle within Ukraine between the dominant force in the Western part of the country and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas East.

As Russian military operations proceeded, perceptions of the core conflict began to change. What was sold by Washington and corporate media at first as a simple war of aggression, to be followed by belligerent operation, has now been seen as a geopolitical war between the United States and Russia, with strategic goals quite apart from the outcome of events in Ukraine, as well as heightening costs of the encounter for the entire world, including the people of Ukraine and especially the extreme poor everywhere.

The essential character in Washington’s geopolitical level of engagement is to care less about bolstering Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression and far more about inflicting defeat on Russia and the renewal of post-Cold War transatlantic unity by the revitalization and expansion of the NATO alliance with Russia once more the enemy of Western democracy. This geopolitical war has much larger strategic consequences and risks than the initial proxy war between Russia and the United States that concerned the future of Ukraine.

Given such developments, the time has come for civil society initiatives to counter the disastrous global confrontation that is now endangering the world, and indeed even species survival prospects, in the pursuit of these geopolitical goals by the United States disguised somewhat by media complicity that continues to convey the impression that the Ukraine War is still only about the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, the daily “war crimes” attributable to the Russians, and the “heroic and increasingly successful efforts of the Zelensky leadership and the courageous national unity of the Ukrainian people”.

This is a basically false and potentially dangerous image, including for Ukraine, and even for the main disseminator of hostile geopolitical propaganda, the U.S. Government and the American people. Perhaps, it comes as a disturbing surprise that only the political extremes of right are interpreting the Ukraine War as producing a global disaster that begun to spill across the borders of Ukraine, with far worse to come without even taking full account of the growing nuclear dangers. What has also become evident is the helplessness of peace-oriented approaches. Such voices are being shut out by mainstream media platforms, which is reinforced by the inability of the UN to act independently of a geopolitical consensus, and by inter-governmental impotence to safeguard human interest in face of the menacing moves by the most powerful states motivated by contradictory geopolitical motivations.

In light of this line of interpretation, law professor Richard Faulk is proposing the establishment of a civil society tribunal along the lines of the Russell Tribunal that brought independent critical voices to the fore on the Vietnam War in the midst of the Cold War in 1966-67. Although this experience was controversial at the time and of questionable relevance to ending that war, the Russell undertaking inspired many notable efforts along the same lines, most notably organized under the sponsorship of the Basso Foundation in Rome. Perhaps, most notable was the elaborate series of such initiatives in response to U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003 culminating in the very significant Iraq War Tribunal of 2005. The proceedings of that event, appropriately held in Istanbul, bear careful scrutiny in the present atmosphere. This self-funded event orchestrated brilliantly by a group of Turkish progressive women brought together internationally prominent jurists and moral authority figures including Indian author Arundhati Roy who served as the chair of the jury of conscience that sat in judgment.

Such a tribunal devoted to passing judgment of the Ukraine Wars, constituted in an atmosphere of urgency, is more important than any of these previous events because the stakes for humanity are higher. The use of the plural is not a typo with reference to Ukraine, but reflects the view explained in my prior articles that the Ukraine Crisis is best interpreted as three interrelated wars with contradictory features: Level 1: Russia vs. Ukraine; Level: 2: U.S. vs. Russia; Level 3: Western Ukraine vs. Donbas Region. For this reason Falk is proposing that the tribunal named Peoples Tribunal on the Ukraine Wars.

The case for such an initiative is not only to give expression to views of the Ukraine Crisis that take international law, geopolitical crime, and nuclear dangers seriously, but also in view of the political incapacity of the UN to act effectively and responsibly when geopolitical actors get heavily embroiled in such a violent conflict which threatens world peace generally and causes massive suffering throughout the world, especially in the least developed countries or in societies dependent on import of basic foodstuffs and energy for reliable supplies at affordable prices. Most of the people vulnerable to such a mega-crisis live in states that have hardly any influence in the formation of global policy. At present a normative vacuum exists in response to the Ukraine Crisis. This leaves transnational civil society as the last, best hope to exert a  responsibility to act, and indeed seize the opportunity.

First, when it comes to war/peace issues there exist two operational sets of norms with respect to international relations: (1) International Law, binding of all sovereign states; (2) Geopolitics that privileges a few powerful states.

The identity of geopolitical actors is not as clearly identified as is that of sovereign states, which is signified by the membership of 193 states in the UN, effectively all. The most influential, yet still misleading, guideline as to geopolitical stature is contained in the UN Charter, taking the form of the right of veto conferred on the five Permanent Members of the Security Council (also known as the P-5) who happened to be the winners in World War II and also the five countries first to acquire nuclear weapons. As the composition of the P-5 has remained frozen in time for more than 77 years it is no longer descriptive of the geopolitical landscape, if it ever was, and for that reason geopolitical identity is currently more blurred and problematic than in the past. Some P-5 members have declined in both hard and soft power since 1945, such as the UK and France, and seem to lack the capabilities and stature to qualify any longer as first tier geopolitical actors. In contrast, countries such as India, Japan, Germany, Brasil, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa have increased their capabilities and raised their stature in such ways as to qualify existentially as ‘geopolitical actors’ at least regionally, and in some instances, globally.

From a normative point of view the distinction between international law and geopolitics is fundamental, and again is made clear by the significance of P-5 status within the UN framework designed to keep the peace after World War II. International law is applicable to every state, but is explicitly not obligatory for the P-5, which is what has made the UN so limited in its ability to provide humanity with a globally supervised war prevention system based on compliance with international law. Giving the Western states a veto was tantamount to acknowledging, as true for international relations in prior centuries, that the UN could not be expected to implement its own Charter norms if they collided with strategic interests of the P-5, but that compliance if forthcoming at all would depend on geopolitical self-restraint or the counterforce of adversary geopolitical actors exerted outside the UN. A similar pattern of obstruction existed when Russia was the Soviet Union, yet its participation that was seen as vital in 1945 if the UN was to enjoy global legitimacy premised on universal membership. Granting the USSR the right of veto was also a matter of protecting the country against the possible tyranny of a Western majority. As the decades have shown, the U.S. in particular has used the veto (e.g. to shield Israel) or avoided the UN (as in the Vietnam War and NATO Kosovo War) when it thought its proposed plan of action would be vetoed. The main lesson is that the UN was deliberately disempowered from the attempt to implement compliance with the UN Charter in relation to geopolitical actors, and the existential reality was not dissimilar from the Westphalian structure of and experience with world order since the mid-17^th century. Regulation of the Great Powers, as they were formerly called, depended on a mixture of self-restraint and what came to be known as ‘the balance of power,’ redesigned in the nuclear age as ‘deterrence.’ Its nuclear dimensions are under challenge from many non-geopolitical states and world public opinion, most recently in the form of the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TCNP), but limited in its impacts due to the distressing non-participation of all of the nuclear states and their allies staking their security on ‘the nuclear umbrellas’ provided by geopolitical actors.

A second set of related considerations can be identified as the ‘Nuremberg Exception,’ which means that a geopolitical actor loses its impunity with respect to international law if it is defeated in a major war. This attitude is evident in the course of the unfolding two-level war in Ukraine. The U.S. at the highest level of its government has been condemning the Russian attack as a war crime that should engage accountability of Putin, and others, if the International Criminal Court acts to fulfill its mandate. This can be viewed from one angle as a kind of ‘winner takes all’ feature of geopolitical order, or from another as gross hypocrisy by recourse to this distortion of justice beneath the banner of ‘Victors’ Justice.’ Nuremberg would enjoy somewhat increased jurisprudential credibility if the U.S. had demonstrated post-Nuremberg its own willingness to be held accountable under the frameworks of international criminal law or the codified version of the Nuremberg Principles, which do not acknowledge a Nuremberg Exception exists, despite its persisting reality.

Thirdly, what is missing in this recital of the jurisprudential realities is the availability of a venue capable of normative assessment of the behavior of geopolitical actors whether they are on the winning or losing side in a major war. It is evident that the UN lacks the constitutional mandate and political independence to undertake such a challenge without a thorough overhaul in its authority structure. Such reforms would require the approval of the very actors whose behavior would then become subject to international law, and these actors show no readiness to move in such a direction. It is for this reason that the only way to close the accountability gap is to rely on civil society activism as a legitimate source of normative authority. One such responsive effort, used in the past, has been to convene a tribunal based on the authority of ordinary people as representatives of society to uphold international law in the event of the failure of the UN or governments to do so. In the setting of the Ukraine Crisis such a tribunal could be entrusted with investigating the three levels of the war from the perspective of international law, with the addition of an aspirational norm that extends the reach of the tribunal to the geopolitical domain.

At present, inter-governmentally generated international law not surprisingly fails to criminalize geopolitical wrongdoing. It is not surprising because throughout modern history geopolitical actors have been the principal architects of international law and vigilant about protecting their freedom of action. It may have become desirable to posit the existence of a residual civil society legislative capacity somewhat analogous to the residual role of the General Assembly of the UN if at an impasse is present in the Security Council with respect to a serious threat to international peace and security. On this basis a civil society endorsement of the concept of ‘geopolitical crime’ is justified to bring the US/Russia geopolitical war within the ambit of the authority of The Ukraine Wars Tribunal.

There are two obvious weaknesses of this line of thinking that should be acknowledged. First, the Tribunal lacks any formal enforcement capability, although it could call for civil society boycotts and divestments that were effective in exerting transformative pressure on South Africa’s apartheid regime. Secondly, the activist impulses that fund and make operational The Ukrainian Wars Tribunal are themselves self-consciously partisan, which is of course no different than intergovernmental institutions. Such partisanship will be subject to criticism from start to finish, which gives some sense that the nature of its undertaking and belief structures will become transparent through time.

It is evident that this proposal is principally an undertaking whose effectiveness will in the first instance registered symbolically rather than substantively in the sense that nothing immediate will change behaviorally in the prosecution and conduct of the three Ukrainian wars. Symbolic impacts should not be underestimated. The political outcomes in the most salient wars since 1945, including the epic struggles against colonialism, were controlled, often after many years of devastating warfare, by the weaker side if measured by material, especially military capabilities. American president, Lyndon Johnson, in the mid-1960s boast that there was no way the United States could lose the war to Vietnam, ‘a tenth-rate Asian power.’ Symbolic venues shift power balances due to the commitments of people, and even material interests over time. The struggles against slavery, racism, and patriarchy each manifest this dynamic. What at first seemed futile somehow became history.

Although the United States was never judged for their war crimes. Not in Vietnam, not in Iraq, not in  Afghanistan, not in Libya, and not for its proxy killings in all dictatorships it installed in South America.

Anyway, it’s about time corporate media, USA & NATO begin to think about A Peace Scenario that challenges their ascendant Victory Scenario that will never happen without blowing the World apart.

Falk's idea is ethical, but the Russel Tribunals for Palestine never made any impact on international institutions or in Society. Was it because Palestine has always been alone and armed only with homemade rockets while Ukraine is fully backed by OTAN and its powerful arsenal and the war criminal was not Russia but Israel and its sponsor is the USA?   

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Washington's Geopolitial War IV

 

On the surface of things, it appears that Russia is at war with Ukraine. But Russian president Vladimir Putin is saying that in actuality it is the United States that is warring against Russia and is simply using Ukraine as a proxy to conduct that war. Putin, therefore, is also saying that given that the United States is waging war against Russia, the possibility of nuclear war continues to rise with each passing day.

That raises an important question for the American people, one that the U.S. mainstream press is loathe to ask: Is Putin’s accusation correct? Are U.S. officials simply using Ukraine as a way to weaken or even destroy Russia without directly participating in a war against Russia?

It certainly would not be the first time that the U.S. national-security establishment used a proxy army in an attempt to disguise its own role in a war against a foreign regime. Recall U.S. officials’ use of a proxy army to attack and invade Cuba. In order to disguise the fact that it was the United States that was waging a war of aggression against Cuba, U.S. officials used a proxy army consisting of Cuban exiles to undertake the invasion. 

While the proxy army was trained and armed by the U.S. national-security establishment, the reason they were using a proxy was so that U.S. officials could deny that the United States was the one that was actually waging war against Cuba. But the fact is that it was the United States that was waging war against Cuba — through the use of a proxy army.

If we place the war in Ukraine in a larger historical context, there is considerable evidence that Putin’s accusation is valid and that U.S. officials are doing with Ukraine what they did with their proxy army at the Bay of Pigs.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. officials were driven by an extreme anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Cuba animus, an animus that actually never went away. Instead, this animus has clearly been transferred to each succeeding generation of Pentagon generals and CIA officials.

That’s why the United States still maintains a brutal economic embargo against Cuba, one that targets the Cuban people with impoverishment and death as a way to achieve regime change in Cuba. 

It didn’t have to be that way. After the Cuban revolution, U.S. officials could have simply left Cuba alone and not put any economic embargo on the island. They could have left Americans free to travel to Cuba and continue trading with the Cuban people. 

Moreover, after the ostensible end of the Cold War, U.S. officials could have lifted their embargo. After all, why continue it if the Cold War was supposedly over? The reason was that the extreme anti-Cuba, anti-communist animus was so powerful within the U.S. national-security establishment that it exerted an obsessive drive within U.S. officials to continue trying to destroy Cuba.

It has been no different with Russia, which was the principal member of the Soviet Union. After defeating Nazi Germany in World War II, Americans were told that unfortunately they could not rest. U.S. officials informed them that America now faced a new official enemy that was arguably more dangerous than Nazi Germany. That new official enemy was a double one: godless communism and the Soviet Union. Americans were told that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world, one that was based in Moscow. Unless the United States acted to stop this conspiracy, Americans were told, the United States and the rest of the world would end up going Red.

That’s how the federal government ended up getting converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which was characterized by the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the CIA, and the NSA, all of which were new to the American way of life. It’s also how we got ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess for the national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors. It’s also why we now live under a government with omnipotent, non-reviewable, dark-side, communist-totalitarian-like powers, such as state-sponsored assassination, kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, mass secret surveillance, coups, regime-change operations, sanctions, embargoes, and alliances with extreme dictatorial regimes.

It’s also how we got NATO, a bureaucratic military alliance whose ostensible purpose was to protect Western Europe from an attack by the Soviet Union. 

Never mind that the Soviets never had any intention of initiating a war against Western Europe, which would inevitably have involved the United States, a nation with nuclear weapons that had showed a willingness to employ them against civilian-populated cities. Never mind that the Soviet Union had suffered near-total devastation in World War II, leaving it with no industrial base to wage another major war. And never mind that the Soviet Union had been a partner and ally of the United States during World War II.

All that didn’t matter. What mattered was the extreme anti-Russia, anti-communist, anti-Soviet animus that was now driving the U.S. government. Anyone who didn’t come on board and embrace this animus was considered a grave threat to U.S. national security. 

As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, there was one man who broke away from this extreme anti-Russia, anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-Cuba animus. That man was President John F. Kennedy, who decided to put an end to it and move America in a different direction — one that instead established a peaceful and friendly relationship with Russia, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world.

Kennedy’s totally different vision for America, needless to say, did not sit well with the U.S. national-security establishment. After his assassination, the United States was placed back on the road toward an extreme anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Cuba, and anti-North Vietnam animus. 

When the Soviet Union unexpectedly withdrew from East Germany and Eastern Europe and dismantled in 1991, everyone thought the Cold War was over. At that point, it would have been logical to dismantle NATO, given that its ostensible mission was now moot.

But what most everyone failed to recognize is that the extreme anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communist obsession that had driven the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA for some 45 years did not suddenly disappear. Instead, it continued to be a driving force within national-security state officials. 

That was clearly manifested by the continuation of the brutal economic embargo against the Cuban people. But it was also manifested by the decision to keep NATO in existence and, even worse, to begin using it to absorb former members of the Soviet Union, which enabled the Pentagon to install its nuclear missiles ever closer to Russia’s border. 

For the past 25 years, Russian officials have objected, just as U.S. officials objected when the Soviet Union installed nuclear missies in Cuba in 1962. U.S. officials knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally ignored those objections. Instead, they continued absorbing Eastern European countries in order to install their nuclear missiles ever closer to Russia’s border.

In the meantime, it is now clear that U.S. officials were training and arming Ukraine, knowing full well that when the day came when they would threaten to absorb Ukraine into NATO, they would be placing Russia in a position of making a choice between letting Ukraine be absorbed into NATO, which would mean U.S. nuclear missiles on Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to achieve regime change, with the aim of preventing the U.S. from installing its missiles on Russia’s border. 

Contrary to popular pronouncements, the war between Russia and Ukraine is not about freedom but rather about the U.S. desire to absorb Ukraine into NATO, an old Cold War dinosaur that could have — and should have — gone out of existence when the Soviet Union voluntarily dismantled.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials, from President Biden on down, have made several Freudian slips regarding the conflict, such as removing Putin from power, trying Putin as a war criminal, weakening and downgrading Russia’s military especially by killing large numbers of Russian troops, destroying the Russian economy, and impoverishing and possibly even killing the Russian people with an extreme set of economic sanctions. 

It’s worth noting, of course, that the Ukraine crisis has caused the Pentagon’s and CIA’s invasions and wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq to go down a memory black hole within the U.S. mainstream press, while, at the same time, helped to continued flooding taxpayer-funded largess into the coffers of the national-security establishment.

Through it all, one thing is crystal clear — the extreme anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Cuba animus that drove the U.S. national-security establishment throughout the Cold War never went away. It clearly continues to drive the current generation of military generals and CIA officials, as we see not only with Cuba but also with Russia. 

Thus, the question naturally arises: Is Putin correct? Are the Pentagon and the CIA doing what they were doing in 1962 against Cuba? Are they driven by their extreme anti-Russia animus to wage war against Russia through the use of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-armed proxy? And are Americans willing to accept the highly dangerous consequences of such a foreign-policy decision?

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

 

As a reminder, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, corporate media called the ensuing conflict “Putin’s war.” Although the U.S. and Europe could have avoided the invasion by calling a halt to NATO expansion and negotiating seriously with the Russians about key security issues. And the U.S. arms had been pouring into Ukraine since the overthrow of the pro-Russian government there in 2014, and Ukraine was using them to kill pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region. But Putin was still held responsible for “crossing the line” into physical violence.

Even so, that is not the end of the discussion. Far from it.  At first one could have called this Putin’s war, but it has always been Joe Biden’s war.

Consider what has happened so far. The advance of Russian troops toward Kyiv was stalled by a combination of factors, including Russian feeble military engagement, Ukrainian determination, and Western weaponry. Russias’ intention was never to take Kiev but to lay the groundwork for a more serious campaign in Ukraine’s south and east, but the advance faltered with heavy losses in men and equipment.

Russia repositioned and strengthened its forces for an attack on the Donbass, long the arena for a violent civil conflict between pro-Russian and pro-Nato Ukrainians, and the coastal provinces connecting that region with Crimea. The Zelensky regime requested additional arms from the United States, and Biden granted it an additional $800 million in advanced weaponry, in addition to the billions previously sent to Kyiv and a continuation of direct military support in the form of intelligence, training, and planning.

The Russians pressed their campaign in the south and east, but Pentagon and State Department officials, elated by their Ukrainian proxis successes, were now promising even larger shipments of heavy weapons to Kyiv and talking about a Ukrainian “victory” after several more months of fighting.  The U.S. secretaries of State and Defense traveled to Ukraine and returned promising to provide the Zelensky regime with all the military and economic support it might need in order to “defeat” Russia and to “weaken” that nation to the point that it would be “unable to threaten others militarily”, leaving the world at the mercy of the USA’s army.

Clearly, Washington’ war goals had escalated.  What, exactly, are these goals? Since the administration has kept them vague, nobody really knows, but one can easily imagine “maximalist” and “minimalist” positions.  At the max, the U.S. hopes that Russia will be unable to secure control of the Donbass region and the Azov coast and will take so much punishment that it will be forced to admit failure and withdraw its forces, quite likely jeopardizing Vladimir Putin’s hold on power. Minimally, the Biden regime wants Ukraine to do well enough in the field to fight the Russians to a draw and force them to negotiate on terms highly favorable to Kyiv.

Whichever scenario is followed, Washington’s perspective has clearly become both more triumphalist and more hardened.  Biden and his team now want the war to continue for several months at least, and to assure this result have agreed to supply Ukraine with a larger quantity of sophisticated weapons than have ever been supplied by the United States to any other ally.  At the same time, the President and his honchos are less inclined to take seriously the possibility of a major escalation of violence or resort to cyberwarfare by the Russians, and more inclined to give Zelensky everything he wants short of a no-fly zone.  (Apparently, even a no-fly zone is now being discussed sub rosa.)

What could possibly justify playing such a high-risk game of chicken? Philosophically, the argument seems to be that since Putin “began the war unjustly”, the Ukrainians and their sponsors have the right to intensify and prolong it in order to defeat and punish the aggressors. The assumption is that the defenders in an unjust war situation have no duty to negotiate with aggressors – not even if their own actions (and inactions) set the stage for the aggression, and not even if their refusal to negotiate risks starting a nuclear war.

Thus, if the Russians should respond to the latest U.S. escalation by – God forbid! – using hypersonic missiles or weapons of mass destruction, their actions would be considered an extension of Putin’s original sin rather than a response to a direct threat to their own security and welfare.

This illustrates the fallacy of defining a war as just or unjust purely on the basis of who began it.  No – a war is unjust not only if it is wrongly started, but also if it is wrongly escalated and prolonged.  The origins of a conflict alone do not determine its ethical or unethical content.  If Putin now offered a ceasefire in order to negotiate the status of the Donbass republics and to assert other Russian needs and interests, would the U.S. and Ukraine be justified in refusing to talk in order to punish or “weaken” him?  Of course not!  In a world of competitive nations, “weakening” Russia as some Bidenites propose really means eliminating that nation as a significant player in international politics.  If this is the nature of the threat now posed by the new U.S. war aims, Russians will naturally consider raising the ante by making new threats of their own.

What accounts for this scheme in American policy?  One cannot avoid thinking that motives more complex and ambitious the defense of Ukrainian independence are involved.  Calling the Russians’ nuclear bluff (if it is a bluff) and demonstrating the “supreme power of U.S. weaponry” secures American hegemony in all of Europe, demonstrates that the American Empire still has teeth, and prepares the ground for a U.S. “pivot” toward confrontation with China.  The happiest campers in the American/European camp are the militarists, the military-industrial companies, and the politicians hungering for a new Cold – or, for that matter, Hot – war.

Whatever the relevant motives may be, it seems clear that “Putin’s War” is more like a Biden’s War. The Russian leader wrongfully fell in Nato’s trap and the American leader wrongfully provoked and prolongs the war.

The war’s current victims are “only” Ukrainians and Russians; its potential victims, if this escalation continues to spiral, are the peoples of Europe and the world.

Surely, It is time for the USA & NATO to back off and both parties concerned – Ukraine and Russia – to step back from the precipice, to sit together with UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres, and to talk sensibly about their legitimate needs and interests.

A Reminder

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

 

2014 saw two pivotal events that led to the current conflict in Ukraine.

The first, familiar to all, was the coup in Ukraine in which a democratically elected government was overthrown at the direction of the United States and with the assistance of neo-Nazi elements which Ukraine has long harbored.

Shortly thereafter the first shots in the present war were fired on the Russian-sympathetic Donbass region by the newly installed Ukrainian government.  The shelling of the Donbass which claimed 14,000 lives has continued for 8 years, despite attempts at a cease-fire under the Minsk accords which Russia, France and Germany agreed upon but Ukraine backed by the US refused to implement.  On February 24, 2022, Russia finally responded to the slaughter in Donbass and the threat of NATO on its doorstep.

The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and in fact rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media.  In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP).  (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA.  Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.)   One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South.  This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end.  As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured.

Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable U.S. sanctions poured onto Russia.  China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia.  This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime.

But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime.  And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India.  India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up.  India did not budge.

India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era.  India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by U.S. threats. Now India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange.  In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of U.S. diktat. Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly?  Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction?  What’s the world’s first most important relationship?

India is but one example of the shift in power.  Out of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia.  That means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the sanctions.   Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s population.  Most of Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil), East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of Taiwan) have refused.  (India and China alone represent 35% of humanity.)

Add to that fact that 40 different countries are now the targets of US sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish economic tactics of the U.S.

Finally, at the recent G-20 Summit a walkout led by the US when the Russia delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20 countries, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join!  Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting later in the year in Bali was rebuffed by Indonesia which currently holds the G-20 Presidency.

These dissenting countries of the Global South are no longer as poor as they were during the Cold War.  Of the top 10 countries in PPP-GDP, 5 do not support the sanctions.  And these include China (number one) and India (number 3).  So the first and third most powerful economies stand against the US on this matter.  (Russia is number 6 on that list about equal to Germany, number 5, the two being close to equal, belying the idea that Russia’s economy is negligible.)

These stands are vastly more significant than any UN vote.  Such votes can be coerced by a great power and little attention is paid to them in the world.  But the economic interests of a nation and its view of the main danger in the world are important determinants of how it reacts economically – for example to sanctions. A “no” to US sanctions is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.

We in the West hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of the crisis in Ukraine.  If one is speaking about the Eurovassal states and the Anglosphere, that is true. But considering humanity as a whole and among the rising economies of the world, it is the US that stands isolated.  And even in Europe, cracks are emerging.  Hungary and Serbia have not joined the sanctions regime and of course most European countries will not and indeed cannot turn away from Russian energy imports crucial to their economies.  It appears that the grand scheme of U.S. global hegemony to be brought about by the US move to WWII Redux, both Cold and Hot, has hit a mighty snag.

For those who look forward to a multipolar world, this is a welcome turn of events emerging out of the cruel tragedy of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.  The possibility of a saner, more prosperous multipolar world lies ahead – if we can get there.

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

 

It has become increasingly clear to the world that there is not one, but two, actually three, distinct levels of conflict embedded in what the world’s media and political leadership deceptively insist of calling the ‘Ukraine War.’

The first level was clearly initiated on February 24, 2022 when Russia launched a military operation against Ukraine.

The second level was hidden to most in the first weeks of the war, but became soon evident as the NATO countries led by the United States placed an increasing emphasis on lending escalating support to Ukraine’s adopted goals of achieving an unexpected military victory. This support took various forms including the steady supply of heavy weaponry, robust economic assistance, punitive sanctions, and a drumbeat of ‘official’ demonization of Russia and its leadership. In the beginning it seemed appropriate to most to lend support to Ukraine as the target of aggression, and hail the resistance effort led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, in defense of a relatively small country “being overrun by its large neighbour”.

Even this widely endorsed narrative was deceptive and one-sided as it overlooked the provocative nature of NATO expansion, abetted in Ukraine’s case by American interference in the internal politics of the country to help turn the political tide in the country against Russia. It is  in this internal setting that the third level of the war persists as there is no doubt that anti-Russian elements in Western Ukraine were deeply abusive toward the majority Russian speaking population in Eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas region. The non-implementation of the Minsk Agreements negotiated in 2014-15 to protect the Ukrainians in the East was never properly implemented. It remains uncertain as whether the Russia/Ukraine level of combat can be resolved without serious addressing Russian and Dombas concerns at the core of this third level of conflict.

What has been apparent to critics for some time is that Western diplomacy has become primarily committed to second level Geopolitical War even at the cost of greatly prolonging and aggravating the Ukrainian war on the ground and producing growing risks of a wider war. Only in the past few days has this priority been more or less acknowledged by high officials in the U.S. Government, most dramatically in the visit of Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, and Austin, Secretary of Defense to Ukraine and later to meeting in Europe with their NATO counterparts. What was revealed was that the number one policy goal of the U.S. was ‘the weakening of Russia’ made a viable undertaking by the unexpected resistance capabilities of Ukrainian armed forces bolstered by a show unified patriotic resolve. In keeping with this line of thinking, arms shipments to Ukraine were increased significantly, and more tellingly, overtly acknowledging the shipment of so-called heavy armaments with offensive capabilities. As this dynamic unfolded, Germany dramatically reversed its policy of not providing heavy weaponry, and the whole tenor of assistance was shifted from helping Ukraine resist to addressing the geopolitical agenda with its two goals: inflicting a humiliating defeat on Russia and signaling China not doubt Western resolve to defend Taiwan.

Despite this shift in emphasis, earlier concerns with escalating the Geopolitical War with Russia have not been abandoned, such as inducing situations that tempt the use of nuclear weapons. White House perceptions of what will cause such a temptation seem dangerous divergent. Apparently, the Biden presidency continues to oppose a No Fly Zone in Ukraine because it would greatly increase the prospects for direct combat encounters between the NATO and Russia, and with it risks of this new species of cold war turning hot. But what of Biden’s demonization of Russia as guilty of genocide and Putin as a war criminal who should be driven from power. And what of the continuously increasing diplomatic, financial, and military assistance to Ukraine. What has been missing all along has been any indication by Washington of receptivity to a diplomacy emphasizing the primary humanitarian imperative of an immediate ceasefire and a political process of compromise and mutual security between Russia and Ukraine the overt international antagonists. It is missing because the U.S. commitment to the Geopolitical War takes precedence over the wellbeing of the Ukrainian people.

Zelensky early in the war indicated receptivity to a ceasefire and political compromise, including permanent neutrality for Ukraine, and signaled his willingness to meet with Putin. More recently, however, Zelensky has pulled back from this dual stance of armed resistance and peace diplomacy, and come to adopt a position seamless with that of the U.S. My conjecture is that Zelensky, although displaying great talents as a wartime resistance leader has very little sophistication about international relations in general, and seems susceptible to this more militarist line both by promises of decisive support from Washington and possible militarist advice from his own general staff. After all, Zelensky’s background is in theater and as a performing comedian without any signs that he is aware the wider risks at stake if Ukraine goes along with premises of the Geopolitical War.

As expected, Moscow has already reacted to this escalation of the second war with the warning that it will not back down, but will take all necessary steps to protect its national security interests, intimating a possible recourse to nuclear weapons. Such inflamed atmospherics can easily produce preemptive acts that accelerate escalation, which is especially serious in the current context that lacks crisis management links of the sort established between Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took that close encounter with an all out war scenario that led these superpower antagonists to understand that they had averted a monumental mutual catastrophe by sheer luck.

While most attention is focused on the inter-governmental play of forces it is helpful to take account of other perspectives: civil society peace initiatives, the views of the Global South, and the initiatives of the UN Secretary General. These perspectives call attention to the startling fact that alternatives to war and geopolitical ambition exist, and that Russia is more globally supported in the Geopolitical War than is the United States. The Global North controls the discourse prevailing on the most influential media platforms, creating the misleading impression that the whole world, except the outliers, are content with U.S. leadership.

Almost from the day the Russian attack began, peace activists and NGOs concerned in some way with peace, security, and humanitarianism urged an end to the killing by way of a ceasefire and some political process that dealt with the level 1 and 3 grievances. This is not to say there were not sharp tensions within civil society, especially surrounding how to interpret the pre-war NATO maneuvers  or the strife in Dombas. Provocations. By and large the mainstream supported outright condemnation Russian aggression, but favored an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to ending the war and mitigating the humanitarian emergency of death, devastation, and displacement.

What contrasted the civil society perspectives in spite of their diversity, with NATO/mainstream media postures, was their shared stress on stopping the killing, the relevance of diplomacy, and their implicit or explicit refusal to condone recourse to the Level 2 Geopolitical War. Typical examples of civil society proposals can be found in the Pugwash Peace Proposal and the Just World Education booklet distributed under the title “Ukraine: Stop the Carnage, Build the Peace” (available from Amazon or from www.justworldeducational.org with its eight policy recommendations).

Given little notice in the USA and Europe was the refusal of the greater part of the Global South to support the mobilization of coercive and punitive sanctions diplomacy directed at Russia and its leader. This split from NATO countriest first became evident in the two votes on Ukraine in the UN General Assembly. The entire world including the most of the main countries in the Global South supported the condemnation of the Level 1 Russian aggression, but either abstained or opposed support for the Level 2 Geopolitical War Initiated by the U.S. against Russia in the early stages of the attack on Ukraine. As Trita Parti of the Washington-based think tank, Quincy Institute, pointed out much of the Global South actually supported Russia in the Geopolitical War context, which was interpreted as the U.S. commitment to extending the mandate contained in a unipolar world order of the sort it had acted upon since the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War. The Global South greatly preferred the dynamics of a multipolar world, and regarded Russia as seeking in Ukraine to reassert its traditional geopolitical suzerainty over its ‘near abroad,’ a stand against the U.S. as the unopposed guardian of security throughout the planet. It should be appreciated that the U.S. has 97% of overseas military bases and accounts for 40% of the world’s military expenditures, or more than the next 11 countries.

The U.S. position is no way renounces traditional geopolitics but seeks to monopolize its implementation. In that spirit it views the attempted reassertion by China and Russia of traditional spheres of influence as an intrusion on international law, while the U.S. at the same time defends its practice of managing the first global sphere of influence in world history. Blinken has said as much, declaring spheres of influence as contrary to international law ever since World War II while claiming for the U.S. the sole prerogative of managing security throughout such a rule-governed world. The UN or international law are subjugated in the face of this assumption of geopolitical dominance resting on a mixture of political ambition and military capabilities.

Throughout the Ukraine crisis Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has articulated a point of view toward the Ukraine Crisis that contrasts in fundamental ways from the positions taken by the political actors on the three levels of conflict. His words and proposals are much closer in spirit to the calls emanating from civil society and the Global South. He expressed the spirit of his endeavors concisely shortly after Russia attacked: “End the hostilities now. Silence the guns now. Open the door to dialogue and diplomacy.” “The ticking clock is a time bomb.”

Traveling in Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin and the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, the message was the same: Focus on ways to end war, and desist from carrying the fight against Russia a day longer.

He told Sergei Lavrov that “We are extremely interested in finding ways to create the conditions for effective dialogue, create conditions for a ceasefire as soon as possible, create conditions for a peaceful solution.” Putin in their one-on-one meeting given the aggressiveness of his counterpart in Washington seemed guardedly receptive to allowing the UN and Red Cross to play a humanitarian role in Ukraine and seemed willing to seek a negotiated end to the conflict on the ground. Of course, it is premature to reach any assessment until deeds follow words, but we have yet to hear a comparable level of peace-mindedness in Biden’s public statements, which so far seem calculated to stir anti-Russian fury rather than to set the stage for ending this frightening multi-level conflict.

The stark difference between the UN SG’s approach and that of the so far geopolitical NATO leadership of the world, should make many persons dedicated to a better future initiate a campaign to set the UN free from geopolitical primacy.

Unraveling the intertwined nature of these three levels of conflict bound up in the ambiguities of the Ukraine War is crucial for an understanding of its complexity and to analyze whether responses and proposals are of service to the general betterment of humanity.

It also facilitates the identification of unresponsive policies and proposals. On this basis, I believe that two overriding assessments emerge: stop the killing by all means available and unconditionally repudiate USA&NATO Geopolitical War.