Tag Archives: Ukraine War

A Holiday Message: Thanksgiving Day 2024

27 Nov

The Thanksgiving Day holiday was first observed by colonists in New England and Canada  as random days of ‘thanksgivings,’ in the form of prayers for blessings of safe journeys, military victories, or abundant harvests. Americans later more self-consciously modelled their holiday celebration after a 1621 harvest feast shared between the Wanpanoag and some English colonists seeking refuge from persecution in their British homeland, becoming known as the ‘Pilgrims.’

In most North American homes, families now celebrate mainly the blessings of being together without any acknowledgement or even awareness of the historical legends surrounding the transformation of religious rituals to the national holiday known by all as Thanksgiving Day. It has become a way of giving thanks for the blessings of life without attention to the dark foundations of these breakaway British colonies, including genocidal tactics employed to clear coveted land of native peoples as well as the importation of slaves from Africa to make the land productive while cruelly abusing these workers of cotton fields and farmlands forcibly removed from their distant homelands by the most predatory crimes of early capitalism. For progressives as with some other naively celebrated holidays, most notably, Columbus Day, these celebratory occasions have increasingly become times to take note of past moral failures societal and state criminality.

This year Thanksgiving Day assumes an especially problematic character, not because of the past but because of the present. For me it is better observed in the spirit of A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE AND REMORSE. Such a dark perspective is adopted to produce creative tensions between the enjoyment of a turkey meal with the onset of deliberately induced mass starvation in the Gaza Strip among the Palestinian survivors of the Israeli onslaught of recent months, including interference with the delivery of food by international aid and relief workers. As well this year’s critical remarking of thanksgiving serves as a grim reminder of the instrumental role of the US Government in the escalation of nuclear risks and rejection of diplomacy in the Ukraine War. The United States, together with several NATO allies, is willing for delusional purposes to sacrifice Ukrainian lives and wellbeing while increasing prospects of a major war, so that it might humiliate Russia with a battlefield defeat.

By remembrance and remorse this year, we can reendow a popular holiday with the sobriety of a hard look at our national ethos of Western global hegemony is being experienced by the disillusioned and frightened peoples of the world. Hopefully, Thanksgiving Day 2025 can be celebrated in moderate, yet mindful, good faith as the blessings of precious life for all.

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Introducing Ismaels’/MacDonald’s Pax America: America’s Unending War on Iraq

29 Aug

[Prefatory Note: In the face of the failure of the US Government to use its diplomatic

leverage to end the war in Ukraine, and renounce the project to score a geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of the people of Ukraine (and Russia) and persisting with its active complicity with Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people residing in Gaza, and so far to a lesser extent to those residing in the West Bank, this book could not be timelier. It is a grim reminder of the Iraq War precedent in which the United States openly embraced a criminal path in both its attack and long occupation of Iraq beginning with  “shock and awe’ unprovoked aggression and culminating in a state-building venture that brought the Islamic State to the region. Memories of geopolitical failures of the magnitude of what took place over the course of more than a decade of occupation and supposed state-building is brilliantly depicted in this authoritative book dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Ismael, the long devoted partner of Tareq Ismael. It was my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword to this fine book, just published, which I strongly recommend both to remind us of the Iraq War and its dismal aftermath, and to cast light on the present negation of the most minimal standards of decency in the course of human interaction. I find myself haunted by a simple epistemological question: WHY DO WE AS A NATION, PEOPLE, AND SPECIES REFUSE TO LEARN FROM PAST TRAGIC FAILURES?]   

Intrioducing Pax Americana: Ae

Foreword to  Pax Americana: America’s Unending War on Iraq by

                  Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, & Leslie T. MacDonald

                  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Narrating the Logic of Pax Americana

Recent references to the Iraq War of 2003 in the West tend mostly to

come from the political or anti-war left sources seemingly intent on issuing

stern reminders that Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was foreshadowed in

its most objectionable features by the US/UK attack followed by a long

controversial occupation of Iraq, while the mainstream tries to erase

America’s experience from collective memory.

Those invoking Iraq as a precedent relevant to Ukraine offer a justifi-

able critique of the imperial aspects of American foreign policy that make

a mockery of self-righteous appeals to international law and the UN

Charter to mobilize international opposition to Russia while building

global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and huge donations of eco-

nomic assistance. Adopting such an ahistorical, abstract, and Eurocentric

optic, however useful, comes at a price. Iraq loses its core reality as a coun-

try inhabited by people who have endured the trials and tribulations of

tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The US

refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South,

especially in the countries of the Middle East, vividly confirmed by its

complicity in Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon Gaza, remains a significant

precedent in relation to the policy debate about Ukraine, but it is far from

telling the whole story of the Iraqi ordeal of the past 80 years.

This remarkable book is written by Jacqueline and Tareq Ismael, both

highly respected Iraqi specialists who are longtime scholarly commenta-

tors on the sorrowful recent history of the country. They present us with

Forewordviii FOREWORD

a devastating critique of the American role in Iraq during the 20 years

since the ill-conceived aggression of 2003, but they do much more. Above

all, they convincingly explicate the comprehensive anatomy of victimiza-

tion that became the fatal destiny of Iraq and its people, climaxing with

the aggressive regime-changing war of 2003. The historical contextualiza-

tion of the war and the refusal to erase from political consciousness its

terrible impact on the Iraqi civilian population is what makes this book

such a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understand-

ing imparted by their analysis goes far deeper than typically superficial

assessments based on a simple model of ‘attack and occupation.’

Jacqueline Ismael, who sadly died earlier this year, and Tareq, her Iraqi-born

writing partner and husband, have long devoted their scholarly lives

to narrating the American desecration of Iraq. Additionally, they have

together built an ambitious academic infrastructure that has made major

contributions to Iraqi studies. These have included the founding of a jour-

nal, organizing international conferences, and publishing books. And per-

haps most of all, by developing an international community of scholars

committed to probing various less-known, yet integral, aspects of the

complex Iraqi experience of the last century. This high-quality scholarship

should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Beltway think

tanks that offer the US government menus of policy options that are gen-

erally pleasing to the Pentagon and mainstream foreign policy venues. In

contrast, the Ismael orientation is objective, exhibiting and encouraging

others to undertake interdisciplinary styles of inquiry and assessment. This

work also valuably merges standard political and economic concerns with

serious attention to the social, ethical, religious, and even artistic and phil-

osophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural heritage. It is this

heritage that has been shattered by Iraq’s encounters with America in the

course of fragmenting the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.

In this necessarily last collaborative book, the Ismaels draw on their

superb qualifications to share with us their cumulative knowledge and wis-

dom about Iraq. This short but profound book manages to consider both

the disasters that have befallen Iraq but also the confused and sinister

behavior embedded in this pattern of dysfunctional US deployments of

hard and soft power over a period of six decades. What results is a highly

instructive book that contextualizes US geopolitical tactics and strategies

in a manner that sheds light on a host of other contemporary concerning

issues around the world. In essence, the Ismaels have managed to interpret

the interplay of America’s global and regional hegemonic ambitions inix FOREWORD

ways that yield a deeply informed narrative of the tragic events that have

ravaged Iraq and spilled over its borders to cause comparable forms of

distress elsewhere in the region. The book brilliantly depicts the intercon-

nections between the fate of Iraq and that of the Middle East as a whole,

presenting an illuminating account of why the impacts of the American

imperial agenda should not be conceptualized as mere aggression followed

by an occupation devoted to benign ‘state-building’ undertakings suppos-

edly aimed at constitutional governance and developmental dynamism.

With electrifying clarity, the Ismaels show that contemporary tragedy of

Iraq should not begin, as in most assessments with a focus on the two wars

in 1991 and 2003, their interim of harsh sanctions, and their chaotic after-

maths, but look at the downward spiral of events starting in 1963. The

book’s illuminating, mostly ignored or suppressed starting point is the

1963 CIA-facilitated coup that replaced the nationalist Qasim govern-

ment with the dictatorial repressive Ba’athist Party leadership, eventually

headed by Saddam Hussein. Tareq Ismael’s personal history of living in

exile ever since this coup and forever scarred by these events of 60 years

that culminated in the roundup and massacre of at least 5000 Iraqi intel-

lectuals and progressive. political activists, lends an aura of authenticity

and significance to these barely recollected events.

In a manner the 1963 coup in Iraq recalls the 1953 coup in Iran that

overthrew the Mossadegh government with the covert help and encour-

agement of the CIA, anticipating in several of its particulars the Iraqi

undertaking ten years later. In Iran, the Shah was restored to the Peacock

Throne, and more importantly, foreign ownership of the Iranian oil indus-

try was restored, with leading American energy corporations the greatly

enriched beneficiaries.

The true character of these events in both major oil producing coun-

tries was thinly disguised by then fashionable Cold War rationalizations of

saving these countries from a Communist takeover by marginalizing and

discrediting Soviet/Marxist/socialist influences that purportedly under-

mined Western strategic interests in the Middle East, as well as threatening

these countries with Stalinist futures. Such state propaganda, spread by an

ideologically subservient Western media, downplayed the true strategic

motivation for these disruptive political events, which was to keep the

energy reserves of the region under secure Western control while entrust-

ing their custodianship to the American oil industry. In this process, the

disregard for the sovereign self-determination rights of the state and suf-

fering of the peoples that followed was ignored as were the allegations thatx FOREWORD

the outcomes reflected the maneuvers of the CIA rather than the revolt of

nationalist forces. Only years later was the instrumental role of the CIA

widely confirmed. The original public rationale portrayed the events as

internally driven anti-Communist rejections of hysterical or tyrannical

leaders.

The book draws appropriate attention to the critical differences between

regime-changing interventions in the period between 1950 and 1990, and

those taking place after the Soviet implosion in 1991. Earlier efforts to

disrupt the politics of self-determination were hidden and covertly carried

out, and hence entrusted to the CIA and collaborating national elites in

countries targeted for regime change. The only overt exceptions of any

consequence during the Cold War occurred in the two wars taking place

in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam where international fault

lines were breached by the revisionist behavior of rival nationalist forces

seeking restored unification of the states as single nations. Elsewhere, the

United States tried to disrupt what it opposed by acting off-stage and rely-

ing on compliant national elements to construct the successor states.

After the Cold War the dynamic of intervention in the Middle East

became overtly militarist, tied to arms sales and predatory globalization.

The US sought to legitimize these overt interventions at the UN by claim-

ing humanitarian and international law justification or counterinsurgency

imperatives in the face of alleged terrorist threats. Among the rationaliza-

tions put forward in 2003 for violating Iraq’s state boundaries were its

possession of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret pro-

gram to develop nuclear weapons; Afghanistan after 9/11 as safe haven for

international terrorism; humanitarian urgency in Libya concerning the

beleaguered population of Benghazi. If UN legitimation was not granted,

as was the case with Iraq (and earlier Kosovo, 1999), then the US together

with allies proceeded to intervene openly, feeling no need for the secrecy

it relied upon during the Cold War. When the UN Security Council

refused the American request for authorization to use force in Iraq, George

W. Bush angrily suggesting that if the UN decided to withhold approval

of US war plans, it would find itself irrelevant. And regrettably, Bush was

to some extent right.

This overtness, also enabled prolonged foreign occupations, and in Iraq

was an alleged necessity to complete the challenge of liberating the coun-

try from its dictatorial past, which required ensuring that the successor

state was a stable and secure exemplar of constitutional democracy. The

only thing hidden from view in carrying out such state-building plans arexi FOREWORD

the various aspects of economic exploitation, including a forced entry into

neoliberal world economy.

This form of state-building by an occupying foreign power is half of the

abusive story exposed by this book. The other half has not been previously

explicated. What the Ismaels have managed to demonstrate through their

focus on the specifics of the American occupation is a set of policies that

had the intended effects of doing the opposite of what was claimed for

state-building. In actuality, the American occupation destroyed prospects

of a stable, competent, and prosperous Iraq, let alone a state protective of

human security and public order. The policies and practices systematically

pursued destroyed sturdy pillars of governmental stability that existed in

Iraq prior to 2003. The occupation purged the armed forces and bureau-

cracy of its Sunni highly professional staffing during the Ba’athist period,

turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and archeological artifacts

undermining cultural identity and national consciousness. Such an

approach gave ample political space to the assertion of a variety of sub-national

grievances and embittered rivalries among religious factions and

ethnic minorities. As the Ismaels explain state-building turned out in Iraq

to be state-ending, such a dismal assessment of the occupation manifested

itself through greatly increased ethnic strife, radical micro-politics, rising

criminality, gross corruption, persisting chaos, and increasing poverty.

It is for these reasons that ‘state-building,’ as argued by the authors, is

better conceptualized as a process of ‘state-ending’ or ‘state deconstruc-

tion.’ This is a radical claim that goes far beyond critiques of the conven-

tional understanding state-building as benevolence gone wrong with

Afghanistan and Iraq especially in mind. The shocking argument that the

Ismaels advance for our consideration is that this outcome was not a fail-

ure of occupation policy but a deliberately orchestrated success. The goal

of such an approach may seem perverse, but reflects American deep state

thinking on the Middle East, as strongly paralleled by Israeli beliefs and

practice, that the cornerstone of regional security is not so much a matter

of weaponry as it is in the existence of weak, internally divided and preoc-

cupied states.

In an informative chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority

further concreteness is added to the exposition of how occupation mis-

shaped Iraq by showing that the US and Israel both promoted Kurdish

aspirations in ways that weakened Iraqi sense of national identity, so vital

for successful state formation projects.xii FOREWORD

The geopolitical hypocrisy of the American role in Iraq is given a bipar-

tisan slant that goes back to the Kennedy role in promoting the 1963 coup

against Qasim and forward to the efforts of both Bush’s to wage war

against their former client state, Iraq. We need to remember that in 1980

Saddam’s Iraq had been persuaded to attack Iran in what turned out to be

a grueling eight-year war, partly extended by US arms sales to both sides.

In addition, Saddam was given ambiguous signals a decade later by the US

ambassador in Baghdad about launching an attack on subsequent annexa-

tion of Kuwait, only to find Iraq subject to international denunciations by

the US President, Arab neighbors, and the UN as a legitimizing prelude

to a ‘shock and awe’ attack, and after another twelve years of punitive

sanctions that ravaged the civilian population of Iraq, yet another American

aggression launched against its former notorious ally who ended up pay-

ing with his life.

This mastery of the Iraq narrative by the Ismaels does what most Iraqi

commentators do not do. That is, they present dismaying evidence that

the wellbeing of the people of Iraq was consistently sacrificed as a sup-

pressed side-effect of this American quest for political and economic dom-

inance in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a

metaphor for the twenty-first-century US imperial (mis)adventures

throughout the entire world. To be sure, the region was especially vulner-

able to imperial design, and a result, has vividly exhibited this state-destroying

and people-victimizing behavior by the United States. This

reflects several factors: oil geopolitics as its supreme strategic priority,

Israel’s junior hegemonic status as its unconditional domestic priority, and

the blowback threats of Islamic radicalism and expansion of Islamic influ-

ence in the region after the 9/11 attacks have shaped its security dialogue

at least until the Ukraine War. We can be most thankful to have such a

book for its insight, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, and for getting

right the complex story of America’s role in Iraq.

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

_ Richard Falk

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The Responsibility of Western ‘Liberal Democracies’ for Gaza Catastrophe

13 Aug

\

[Prefatory Note : This is the text of an interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute modified for clarity and style, with no changes in substance.]

 Richard Falk: Western “Liberal Democracies” Responsible for Genocide in Palestine

Mike Billington : This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I have the pleasure of having an interview today with Professor Richard Falk, who has done another interview with us earlier. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton, among other positions he holds in institutions around the world, mostly peace related. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine. So, given the circumstances that we have today in the Middle East, it’s a very timely moment to have a discussion with Professor Falk. So let me begin with that. Professor, the assassination of Haniyeh today in Tehran is clearly a sign that Israel is trying its best to get an all-out war with Iran started, but also, it’s the fact they just killed the person who was leading negotiator with Israel for peace in Palestine. So what are your comments on that?

Prof. Falk: I agree with your final sentences that this is certainly either gross incompetence on Israel’s part or a deliberate effort to provoke a wider war. And a shady effort by Israel to compel the engagement of the United States in Israel’s multiple struggles in the region. One should also refer here to the double assassination. Not only Haniyeh, but Nasrallah’s right-hand assistant and prominent military commander, Fouad Shukra, who was killed 2 or 3 days ago, in Beirut. And so now Israel in successive inflammatory assassinations attacking the capitals of Lebanon and Iran, certainly signaling an almost intentional search for some kind of escalatory response. The Supreme Leader of Iran has already declared that that Iran will arrange — he didn’t go into detail — arrange an appropriately harsh response, in retaliation for Israel’s criminal act. In the Lebanese context, Nasrallah and Hezbollah deny the Israeli justification for the attack, which was the missile that landed in the Golan Heights a few days earlier, killing several Syrian children playing on a soccer field. It almost certainly was not intended as the target by whoever fired the missile, which is still being denied by Hezbollah. The very explosive situation in the Middle East — perhaps the assassinations were motivated by the wish to distract attention from Israel’s failure to destroy Hamas and Netanyahu’s unpopularity in Israel. At best, this is a very dangerous way of proceeding because a multi-state war in the Middle East will bring widespread destruction , including likely attacks on Israeli cities, something Israel has avoided over the course of its existence. This may yet be a dramatic turning point for the worse in the whole experience of Israel’s defiance of international law, international morality and just plain geopolitical prudence.

Mike Billington : You have been a very outspoken supporter of the role of the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and their rulings, including the decision on the South African petition that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza; the issuing of arrest warrants on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders; and more recently, the verdict that the entire occupation of the Palestinian territories has been illegal from the beginning, ordering it to end the occupation and withdraw the settlements. But of course, Israel has ignored them totally, while the US and the EU have equally ignored them. As you pointed out in one of your articles, Bibi Netanyahu even said “No one will stop us,” from driving all the Palestinians out or killing them. What can be done overall to deal with the Gaza genocide?

Richard Falk: Well, it is, of course, a terribly tragic moment for the Palestinian people who are faced with this grotesquely sustained and executed genocide, that has now gone on for more than nine months on a daily basis. As your question suggests, Israel has been crucially backed up throughout this process by the complicity of the liberal democracies, above all the US. And so long as that power relationship persists, it’s very unlikely that an effective intervention on behalf of Palestine, or to stop the genocide, can be organized and implemented. From that point of view, these judicial rulings, although they give aid and some comfort to supporters of Palestine are not able to influence the situation on the ground, which continues to be horrifying. At the same time, the rulings are important in depriving Israel and the West of complaining about Palestine and Hamas as violators of international law, including ‘terrorist’ accusations. In other words, by reliably finding that Israel is in gross violation of international law and by issuing arrest warrants, global judicial procedures deprive these aggressive countries from opportunistically using international law as a policy instrument the way they have against Russia in the Ukrainian context. It also influences media discourse and civil society behavior, particularly activists throughout the world, who feel vindicated and challenged to do more by way of pro-Palestinian solidarity initiatives.

There exist a variety of initiatives underway in civil society that not only brand Israel as a rogue state, but also propose nonviolent acts of boycotting, divesting, and shows of opposition, highlighted by the activism of students in university campuses around the world giving rise to repressive responses by pro-Israeli elites in and out of government. This has become quite a distinctive phenomenon — even during earlier student activist periods involving South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, there wasn’t nearly as much passion or such animated expressions of civil society activism. This is now a near universal reaction, including a growing portion of citizens in the country whose governments are complicit in supporting Israel’s commission of genocide.

Also prresent is a contested and growing gap between what the citizenry wants and the government is doing. This gap was highlighted and dramatized by the scandalous, honorific speech that Netanyahu gave last week to a joint session of Congress, where he received a hero’s welcome, frequent standing ovations, thunderous applause and cordial meetings in the White House with Biden and Kamala Harris. It was widely observed that Harris abandoned protocol by not attending the joint session of Congress over which the vice president ordinarily presides whenever a foreign leader is making such an address, and the Netanyahu visit was met be large protests in the streets of Washington.

Mike Billington : Your friend, and mine, Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder and the head of the International Movement for a Just World based in Malaysia, has written a letter to all member nations of the UN noting, as you have also, that the West is ignoring the evil in Gaza, and called on the UN General Assembly to act upon Resolution 377, which, as I understand it, allows the General Assembly, when the Security Council fails to take action to stop a disaster against peace, to act in its own name, to deploy forces, I think unarmed forces, to intervene. You are, among other things, a professor of international law. What is your view of this option?

Prof. Falk: There is that option, that was adopted in the Cold War context of the Korean War, with the objective of circumventing future Soviet vetoes. GA Res. 377 was thought initially to give the West a possibility of nullifying the Soviet veto and mobilizing the General Assembly to back Western positions. As the anti-colonial movement proceeded, the US in particular became more and more nervous about having an anti-capitalist General Assembly empowered to act when the Security Council was paralyzed. To my knowledge that Resolution 377 has never been actually invoked in a peace – war situation. I think there is a reluctance to press the West on this kind of issue, because it would require, to have any significance, a large political, military, and financial commitment, as well as a difficult undertaking to make effective. So I’m not optimistic about such a move to empower the General Assembly . I think the law can be interpreted in somewhat contradictory ways, as is often the case, particularly where there’s not much experience. But I don’t think the political will exists on the part of a sufficient number of governments to make the General Assembly act on behalf of Palestine. I think in general making the UN more effective and legitimate, empowerment of the General Assembly would be desirable and should be supported by people that want to have a more law governed international society, but preferably without relying on this Cold War precedent

.

Mike Billington : On that broader issue, do you have any hope or any expectation that the UN in general will be reformed in the current crisis situation internationally?

Prof. Falk: I’m skeptical about that possibility. The forthcoming UN Summit of the Future on September 22-23 is dedicated to strengthening the UN. This is an initiative of Secretary-General Guterres that seeks to discuss some ambitious ideas about UN reform, enlarged participation by civil society and more democratic, transparent procedures for UN operations. But my guess is that the Permanent Members, and probably including China and Russia, will not push hard for such major development. Each of the P5 states seems to believe that their interests are better protected in a state-centric world, even if geopolitical managed, than they would be in a more structured world system operating according to a  more centralized authority structure. It might  become even more susceptible to Western domination and manipulation than is the case with present arrangements.

Mike Billington: On the US situation, you issued a public letter to Kamala Harris soon after Biden dropped out of the race. There and elsewhere, you have denounced what you called the “diluted optimism” of President Biden, who talks about American greatness and the great future America is looking forward to, and so forth. You called it: “a dangerous form of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national circumstances and a stubborn show of a failing leader’s vanity.” you express some hope that Kamala Harris will dump the Biden team of Blinken and Sullivan. Who do you think could possibly come to be her advisors? Who could, in fact, change the failed direction of the Biden-Harris administration?

Prof. Falk: You raise a difficult issue, because effective governance involves balancing various pressures from without and within the apparatus of the state. I think Harris knows and respects these constraints, aware that even an elected leader is restricted, encountering resistance if public policy dissents from the main tenets of the Washington Consensus. Harris’s policy choices are restricted because those that are prominent enough to be eligible for confirmation in the top jobs are either conforming to this geopolitical realism, or they’re regarded as too controversial to get by the congressional gatekeepers and survive media objections. In fairness to Harris, or any leader for that matter, it’s a difficult undertaking to make American foreign policy particularly more congruent with the well-being of people and more oriented toward sustaining peace in a set of dangerous circumstances that exist in different parts of the world. And, of course, the Israeli domestic factor is probably also at least a background constraint. In light of this, the best that I could hope for, realistically, is some critical realist personalities like John Mearsheimer or Anne-Marie Slaughter, or possibly Stephen Walt. These are people that have been more enlightened in their definition of national interest and more critical of the Jewish lobby and of other manipulative private sector forces. But they’re strictly, and properly, categorized as realists, A more progressive possibility, but probably still too controversial for serious consideration, would be Chas Freeman despite his distinguished diplomatic background. Obama wanted to give him an important position in the State Department. But he was perceived even in 2009 at that time as sufficiently controversial as to be blocked, and Freeman’s proposed appointment was withdrawn. Obama himself is an outside possibility. He’s privately let it be known that he’s quite critical of the way in which Israel has behaved in this period. He is oriented toward domestic policy yet would like to promote a more peaceful, less war oriented world. But whether he would be willing to play that kind of role, having been previously President is uncertain, and whether Harris would want such a strong political personality within her inner circle remains uncertain. Possibly, if he was willing, he could be the US Ambassador at the UN or some kind of other position. But it’s strange that in a country of 330 million people, there are so few individuals can both back a progressive foreign policy agenda and get by the gatekeepers, a part of whose job is to make sure that more progressive voices are not appointed to top foreign policy positions. So, for instance, someone like Chomsky or Ellsberg, if heallthy, would be perhaps amenable to serving in a Harris government. And she might be eager to chart a somewhat independent path and give more sensitive attention to foreign policy and more support to the people that have been suffering from inflation and other forms of deprivation resulting from a cutback in social protection that has occurred in the last decade or so.

Mike Billington : In a more general sense, you’ve been critical of what you call the “incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there, beyond American borders, at a time when the US role has never been more controversially intrusive.” As you know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the head of the Schiller Institute, has initiated an International Peace Coalition (IPC) which is aimed at addressing that problem, bringing together pro-peace individuals and organizations from around the world, many of whom have different political views, but to put aside those differences in order to stop the extreme danger of an onrushing nuclear conflict with Russia, and also possibly with China, and to restore diplomacy in a West which has fully adopted the imperial outlook of the British Empire, which they now call the “unipolar world.” How can this movement be made strong enough to make those kinds of changes in the paradigm?

Prof. Falk: That’s an important challenge. There are other groups that are trying to do roughly parallel things. I’ve been involved with SHAPE [Save Humanity And Planet Earth], the group that Chandra Muzaffar is one of the three co-conveners along with Joe Camilleri [and myself]. But it’s extremely difficult to penetrate the mainstream media, and it’s very difficult to arrange funding for undertakings like your own, that challenge the fundamental ways that the world is organized. The whole point, I think, of these initiatives is to create alternatives to this kind of aggressively impacted world of conflict, and to seek common efforts, common security, human security, that humanistically meets the challenges of climate change and a variety of other issues that are currently not being addressed adequately. But this kind of development depends, I think ultimately, on the mobilization of people. Governments are not likely to encourage these kinds of initiatives. The question needs to be rephrased: how does one mobilize sufficient people with sufficient resources to pose a credible challenge to the political status quo in the world?

Mike Billington : In that light, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has also called for the founding of what she called a Council of Reason, reflecting back on the Council of Westphalia, which led to the Peace of Westphalia, where people of stature, as you indicated, are brought to step forward and speak out at a time when that kind of truthful, outspoken approach is sorely lacking and very, very much needed. What’s your thought on that?

Prof. Falk : I think all such initiatives help to build this new consciousness that is more sensitive to the realities of the world we live in. There has been, as you undoubtedly know, a similar Council of Elders composed of former winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and a few selected other individuals, but it hasn’t had much resonance either with the media or with government. It’s very difficult to gain political space and non-mainstream credibility the way the world is now structured, as empowered by a coalition of corporate capitalism and militarized states. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about what can be achieved. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t struggle to do what at least has the promise and the aspiration to do what’s necessary and desirable. And the Counsel of Reason, presumably well selected and adequately funded, and maybe with an active publication platform, could make contributions to the quality of international public discourse. It’s worth a try, and I would certainly support it.

Mike Billington: I appreciate that. What are your thoughts on the peace mission undertaken by Viktor Orban?

Prof. Falk: Well, I don’t have too many thoughts about that. It seemed to coincide what many independent, progressive voices were saying. In any event. The interesting thing about Orban’s advocacy is that he’s the leader of a European. state, and therefore his willingness to embark on such a journey and to seek ways of ending the Ukraine conflict is certainly welcome. He, of course, has a kind of shadowy reputation as a result of widespread allegations of autocratic rule within Hungary. I don’t know how to evaluate such criticisms I haven’t been following the events in Hungary, but he’s portrayed in the West as an opponent of liberal democracy. And for that reason, he doesn’t receive much attention from the media or from Western governments overall. Orban’s message seems too deserve wider currency, but whether he can deliver that message effectively seems to me to be in fairly significant doubt. I think the Chinese are in a better position to make helpful points of view toward ending the Ukraine War.

Mike Billington : You’re saying that he is accused of being against “liberal democracy.” Do you think criticism of liberal democracy is wrong?

Prof. Falk: No, no. I consider myself a critic of liberal democracy. But I think liberal democracy remains  powerful in the West because it’s linked to corporate capitalism on the one side, and the most militarized states on the other side. The liberal façade of these Western states purports to be guided by the rule of law and human rights, presenting an attractive image to many people who close their eyes to the contradiction in the behavior of these states, especially in foreign policy.

Mike Billington : You’re generally very pessimistic about the US election, saying that you saw the choice — this was before Biden dropped out — but you saw it as “a warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” That’s pretty strong. You welcomed Biden dropping out, but do you see any improvement in the choices today?

Prof. Falk: Yes, I see at least the possibility of an improvement, because we don’t know enough about how Kamala Harris will try to package her own ideas in a form that presents an independent position. It’s conceivable it would even be to the right of Biden, but I don’t think so. Her own background on domestic issues is quite progressive and at the same time pragmatic. As a younger person, she has a mixed record, to say the least while serving as prosecuting attorney and attorney general in California. But I think there is a fairly good prospect that she will be more critical of Israel during the last several years as Biden’s vice president. She has already indicated a determination to not support Israel, at least openly, if they engage in a massive killing of Palestinian civilians. She probably feels she is walking a tight rope to avoid alienating Zionist funders and others who would be hostile should she show a shift to a more balanced pro-Palestinian position.

Mike Billington : you referred to Trump in that passage as a warmonger. But on the other hand…

Prof. Falk: No, you misunderstood me. Biden is the warmonger.

Mike Billington : Oh, a “warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” I got it. So those terms were both as a description of Biden.

Prof. Falk: I would never call Trump “peace minded,” but he has at various points suggested an opposition to what he and others have called “forever wars,” these US engagements in long term interventions that always seemed to have ended up badly, even from a strategic point of view, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump is so unpredictable and unstable that I wouldn’t place any confidence in his words or declared interntions. He does seem determined to move the country in a fascist direction if he’s successful in the election. And if he isn’t successful, he seems to want to agitate the country sufficiently so that it experiences some level of civil strife, or at least unrest.

 Mike Billington: Well, he clearly is insisting that there must be peace and negotiation with Russia on the Ukraine issue. Do you see any hope that he would also negotiate with China in terms of the growing crisis there?

Prof. Falk: I doubt it because of his seeming perception of China as an economic competitor of the US, and as one that, in his perceptions has taken advantage of the international economic openness to gain various kinds of unfair economic advantages. I think he is, if anything, more likely to escalate the confrontation with China and at best to put relations on a very transactional basis, which suggests that only when it was to the material benefit of the US would the US Government in any way cooperate with China even for the benefit of the public good. 

Mike Billington: Of course, we saw just recently in China that the Xi Jinping government brought many diverse Palestinian factions together in Beijing, and that they did come to an agreement. What are your thoughts on the agreement that they came to and what effect will that have?

Prof. Falk: It seems helpful.  I hope it lasts. There have been prior attempts, mostly in the Middle East, mostly with Egypt playing an intermediary role, especially before the present Sisi government. And none of these earlier unity arrangements have lasted. There is a lot of hostility rivalry among the PLO, Fatah Hamas, and several other Palestinian factions. It relates to the religious – secular divide, differences of personality, patterns of corruption, and opposed adjustments to Israeli criminality. It was encouraging to me that Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, condemned the assassination of Haniyeh. That, I think, was an early confirmation of the potential importance of this Beijing Declaration and the successful, at least temporarily successful, effort at bringing these Palestinian factions together in common struggle. And from the Palestinian point of view, unity has never been more important as a practical matter to achieve and sustain any hope of statehood or realization of their right of self-determination. The entire future of Palestinian resistance probably depends on being able to have a more or less united front to sustain hopes that a post-Gaza arrangement will be beneficial for Palestine.

Mike Billington : You recently signed an appeal which was issued by the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, which has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for alleged complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel. What are your expectations for that effort?

Prof. Falk: The ICC, the International Criminal Court, is much more susceptible to political pressure than is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is part of the UN and came into existence when the UN was established back in 1945. The ICC was established recently, in 2002. It doesn’t have many of the most important countries among its members or signatories to its treaty, the so-called Rome Treaty. It would be a pleasant surprise if the Chamber of ICC judges follows the Prosecutor’s recommendation and issues these arrest warrants. Already, Netanyahu has given the recommendation of the prosecutor an international visibility by denouncing them and calling on the US and, and the liberal democracies to bring pressure on the ICC to avoid issuing the warrants. And that reflects the strong impression that even though Israel defies international law, its leaders are very sensitive about being alleged to be in violation, especially of international criminal law and particularly of the serious offences alleged to have taken place in Gaza. The basis for recommending arrest warrant for Israeli leaders doesn’t extend to cover the elephant in the room — genocide. It enumerates other crimes that Israel, that Netanyahu and Gallant, are said to be guilty of perpetrating, and does the same thing for Hamas, in trying to justify issuing arrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders. Of course, they don’t have to worry about Haniyeh anymore, and I think, I’m pretty sure he was one of the three Palestinians who were recommended as sufficiently involved in the commission of international crimes on October 7 to justify the issuance of arrest warrants.

Mike Billington: As I mentioned, you were the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine from 2008 to 2014. During that period, you were regularly declared by Israel to be an anti Semite for things you said and did during that time. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that at this point. Also, the current person in that position, Francesca Albanese, is also under attack from Israel. What do you think about her role today?

Prof. Falk: Well, as far as my own role is concerned, the attacks came not directly from the government, but from Zionist oriented NGOs, particularly UN Watch in Geneva and some groups in the US and elsewhere, all in the white Western world. I mean, all the attacks on me. And of course, they were somewhat hurtful. But this kind of smear is characteristic of the way in which Israel and Zionism has dealt with critics for a long time. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader in the UK, has been a victim of such a smear and defamatory campaign. It’s unfortunately a tactic that has had a certain success in branding one as lacking in credibility, and thus not fit to be listened to by the mainstream. Israel and its Zionist network are not interested in whether the allegations are truthful or even grounded in factual reality. This effort has as its primary aim the deflecting the conversation away from the message to the messenger.

And they’ve done, shockingly and without shame, the same thing with Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur. Francesca is an energetic, dedicated, very humanistic person and gives no signs of anhy kind of ethnic prejudice, much less anti-Semitism. She’s written very good reports in the time she’s been the Special Rapporteur, and bravely and forthrightly confronted her attackers.

It’s a real disgrace that this unpaid position at the UN is dealt with in such an irresponsible and personally hurtful way. The special rapporteurs enjoy independence, which is important in such roles, but they’re essentially doing a voluntary job, that frees them from the discipline of the UN, but also makes them vulnerable to these personal attacks that are intended to be vicious. The UN does nothing very substantial to protect those of us that have been on the receiving end of this kind of ‘politics of deflection.’ UN passivity reflects a core anxiety within the UN bureaucracy centered on losing funding from the countries that support Israel.

After I finished being Special Rapporteur, I collaborated with Professor Virginia Tilley to produce one of the first detailed reports in 2017 examining contentions of Israeli apartheid. The report was denounced by Nikki Haley [US Ambassador to the UN] in the Security Council soon after its release. I was singled out by her as a disreputable person undeserving of serious consideration. The UN secretary General Guterres, newly appointed at that time, was publicly threatened by Haley with withholding US funds if he didn’t remove our report from the UN website, and to our regret he complied. He removed the report, though it was already the most widely read and frequently requested report in the history of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, which is a regional commission of the UN.

Mike Billington: And who was it that ordered it removed?

Prof. Falk: Guterres. Yes. Removal caused a stir. The head of this UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), was a civil servant named Rima Khalaf who resigned her UN post as a consequence of what was done. Our report was commissioned as an independent academic study. We were treated as scholars and not as UN civil servants. But the report was sponsored and accepted by a UN agency, and thus could not entirely escape its association with our conclusions that were controversial at the time.

Mike Billington: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we close?

Prof. Falk: No, I think we’ve covered a lot. I would hope that things will look better in a few months, but I’m not at all confident that they will. They could look a lot worse if this wider war unfolds in the Middle East. And if they are new tensions that come to the surface in the Pacific area. I find myself clinging to this marginal hope that Kamala Harris will not only win the election but surprise us by being more forthcoming in promoting an enhanced image of what a liberal democracy means internationally.

Mike Billington: Let us hope. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to do this at a critical moment, with your own personal role in the Middle East having been so important historically and still today. So we’ll get this circulated widely. And let’s hope that, in fact, we do see a big change at a moment where the crisis is such that you would think people would be stepping forward all over the world to stop the madness.

Prof. Falk: Yes but they need — I found that they need the entrepreneurial underpinning. They have to have the support, sufficient funding. Support so that their words will have weight. This unfortunate, but it’s one of the political dimensions of the imperative: ‘follow the money.’ 

Mike Billington: Something we’ve always had to deal with in the LaRouche movement. I invite you to join us on Friday, we will have the 61st weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition, at 11:00 East Coast time, on Friday. And it would be very useful if you could attend and perhaps say some of what you said today in this interview or if that’s not possible, perhaps we could read a section of what you said today, during that event. So I’ll correspond with you to see if you can attend on Friday.

Prof. Falk : I know that I can’t because I have to attend a conference in Istanbul. I’m living these days in southern Turkey, a plane ride away from Istanbul. And I’m taking part in a conference on international law after Gaza , a little bit optimistic in the title. I’m occupied all day either with this trip or with my role at the conference.

Mike Billington: All right. Well, I’ll correspond with you about whether we may be able to read a portion of what you had to say in the interview today for the for the attendance.

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How to Think About the Ukraine War after 18 Months

20 Sep

[Prefatory Note: The post below is the stylistically revised text of an interview conducted on Sept 5, 2023 by Mike Billington, who is a senior leader of the Schiller Institute. It addresses various aspects of the global political setting that has crystallized since the Russian attack of Feb. 5, 2022 on Ukraine. The repudiation of diplomacy as an alternative war, despite the costs and dangers of continuing the Ukraine War are quite striking. Zelensky’s appeal for further aid at the UN on Sept. 20th combined with media reports that NATO is preparing for a long war are exceedingly discouraging as is the unwillingness of the warring parties to take account of the harmful spillover effects on the most food and energy vulnerable countries in the world.]

Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. And I’m pleased to be here today with Professor Richard Falk, who has agreed to an interview about current affairs and world developments in this crucial moment in history. Professor Falk, would you like to say a few words about your own history and your role in history?

Prof. Falk: I’m not sure I have a role in history. My career has been framed by academic affiliations since my early 20s. I’ve taught at universities all of my adult life, starting with Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, in 1955, moving to Princeton University, where I stayed for 40 years, retiring in 2001, and since then I have been connected both with the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Queen Mary University in London. From the mid-1960s I became an engaged citizen, at first principally in my role as an opponent of the Vietnam War in a variety of public spaces, then other issues became preoccupations.

I’ve done a fair amount of writing throughout my life, basically bridging my academic and activist preoccupations. I have made an effort to portray this experience in a memoir called Public Intellectual—The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim—along with a stream of commentary on global issues. I have led at times a confusing life, which account for the mystifying title, I suppose. I have been active through the UN in supporting the Palestinian struggle for human rights and self-determination and served as UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Council on Occupied Palestine between 2008 and 2014. During this period I was frequently defamed as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew and otherwise targeted and discredited. Recently, I’ve lived an increasingly sedentary life. I continue to comment on global developments, publishing mainly on online platforms and doing frequent interviews with a variety of journalists

Over the years I have been ‘a closet poet,’ expressing strong feelings about what is precious in life and also some reflections on frustrations that come with in the territory of love and loving. A few years ago, I self-published a book of poems, Waiting for Rainbows, while hardly being noticed did result in a few affirming responses.

For the past 25 years I have had two residential habitats: Turkey and the US, two troubled societies. The U.S. has a slightest healthier governance framework and Turkey a far more safe and secure societal and cultural infrastructure.

I apologize if I have responded excessively to your invitation to  introduce myself, and in one respect I have not said enough. Let me add to my autobiographical remarks that I’m glad to do this interview with Mike Billington, despite severe differences in the past. with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Unsurprisingly, I have not enjoyed being a target of what I consider defamatory attacks connected with my support for the democracy anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines and the insurgent campaign for the protection of human rights in the Shah’s Iran. Such disagreements persist. I overlook this background because I feel strongly that those who seek a safer, more secure, more peaceful and just world have to let such bygones-be-bygones and work together in the present for the greater public good, with a particular responsibility to future generations.

Mike Billington: Well, that’s quite interesting. You and I have discussed privately those differences, which we maintain as differences, both on the history of them and other aspects of things. But they don’t necessarily have to come up today unless you wish to bring them up further.

Let me start by referencing the fact that you were a speaker at an event sponsored by my friend Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, the head of Just International, organized by an organization called SHAPE, Save Humanity And Planet Earth—along with other speakers from the US, from Russia, from Korea, and from Australia. I found that you referred to what you called the “unstable tension between geopolitics and self-determination,” which I found to be the most profound point of that conference. Could you comment on that and explain what you mean by that?

Prof. Falk: I will try. I’ve been preoccupied with geopolitics in the context of the Ukraine War, which started as a Russian attack on Ukraine, transformed itself, due to the intrusive role that US/NATO forces played in response, from a simple bilateral conflict into what I regard as a “geopolitical war” between Russia and the United States. An important consequence of this added form of conflict, generally overlooked, is that an acceptable outcome in Ukraine becomes subordinated by stages to the strategic goal of inflicting a geopolitically significant defeat on Russia. A secondary goal of the geopolitical war on the part of the U.S. is to seize the opportunity warm China not to attempt, with respect to Taiwan, a military solution similar to what Russia has tried to do in Ukraine, or at least that it was alleged to be trying to do.

My own interest in the clash between the nationalist politics of self-determination and post-colonial geopolitical ambitions of the U.S, go back to the experience with which these issues arose from my political engagement with opposition to the Vietnam War. I was particularly struck by its outcome, by the striking fact that the U.S., despite being so predominant militarily and making a huge reputational investment over a long period of time, still managed to lose the war. Such a pattern repeated with variations several times since Vietnam has been, I think, significantly responsible for the decline of the US as a predominant power in world withing political, economic, and cultural spheres. This declines reflects many years of overinvestment and overreliance on military solutions and military approaches to international problems, coupled with an underestimation of the potency of national self-determination as shifting the balance in conflicts between external intervenors and internally mobilized forces of resistance. Vietnam showed their extraordinary resolve in the face of devastating punishment to sustain their resistance over time with greater patience and political endurance than the imperial intervenor was able to muster in its campaign to suppress the basic rights of a people in a historical period of decolonization. What I fear in the present context is a similar exaggerated reliance on militarism as a solvent for international problems and an activation of a variety of nationalist responses dangerously intensifying geopolitical warfare, and posing unacceptable risks of a hot war, including a nuclear confrontation.

Of course, the situation is superficially different in Ukraine because, purportedly, the nationalist forces are supported by the US and NATO. But I think the broader reality is that the Ukrainian people are being sacrificed on the altar of this post-Cold War attempted recalibration of a superseded geopolitical status quo embodying unipolarity.

Mike Billington: Let me mention that geopolitics, of course, originated with people like Mackinder and Haushofer and other theoreticians for the British Empire. It’s always been the political view of the Empire that the world is a zero sum game—that to benefit ourselves we have to defeat the others. And that certainly is what you just described in terms of the current proxy war with Russia and the threat to China, and really to the whole developing sector.

Prof. Falk: I distinguish between a proxy war of the sort that has continued in Syria for more than a decade, in which the objective of the external political actors is to exert control over the internal politics of the country that is scene of the violent combat. This is not my view of what the Ukraine War is really about. In other words, it’s not primarily about the internal effects of the conflict, which I believe each of the three geopolitical actors have come to view as secondary to the impact the Ukrainian political outcome will have on the geopolitical alignments governing relations among the US, Russia and China. I see this high stakes of this realignment agenda as providing the main reason why it more clarifying to treat this confrontation in Ukraine as a geopolitical war rather than a proxy war.

Mike Billington: Well, generally, the term proxy war is meant to be a way of saying that this is really a war against Russia. It’s being fought with Ukrainian bodies. But the aim, as you are pointing out, is to weaken and undermine, or even destroy Russia and potentially China in the same manner.

Prof. Falk: And to reinforce the unipolar prerogatives that the US has claimed and exercised since the collapse of the Soviet Union as a rival over 25 years ago.

Mike Billington: Yes, exactly. You said in the SHAPE event that I mentioned just now, one of your quotes was that the greatest danger facing the world is the West’s “insistence on keeping the unipolar world in place using military methods,” which is what you’ve just reiterated, and that this was aimed at obscuring the decline in power of the US and of the G7 generally. China and the BRICS nations, as we saw last week (at the BRICS Summit) and the Global South, are generally no longer submitting to the colonial division of the world, and they’re renewing the Spirit of Bandung. What is your view of the BRICS and the August 22-24 BRICS summit in South Africa?

Prof. Falk: Basically, I have a very positive view of the BRICS role. I think it goes beyond the Bandung Spirit because it is more focused on restructuring the global engagement of the non-West. Bandung I was understandably preoccupied with seeking diplomatic distance from the Cold War, as well as  “non-involvement in the struggles of the North.” In this sense, I think a posture of geopolitical neutralism was main motivation of Bandung I, that is, to avoid getting caught up in the competing ideologically antagonistic alliances between the global powers—an antagonistic framework of US and Soviet Union relations that increasingly posed threats of a Third World War. The Bandung countries wanted to focus on their own development and to stay uninvolved in this post-colonial geopolitical struggle for global ascendancy.

I regard the BRICS as responding to a different configuration of concerns. As such it is a more creative form of involvement that has its own defensive and offensive geopolitical ambitions. A primary example of this engagement sensibility of the BRICS is their campaign aimed at the de-dollarization of international trade, which if even partially successful, will have a huge impact on the Global North, and also by giving shape and direction to a new type  of multipolarity that is very different than what the North and the G-7 want. It’s very instructive to compare the documents emanating from the May 2023 meeting of the G-7 at Hiroshima, both in their tone and rhetoric and substance, from those emanating from the BRICS Summit, most notably the Johannesburg Declaration that was issued just last week. On almost all counts I would rather live in the world envisioned by the Johannesburg Declaration than the one depicted at Hiroshima.

Mike Billington: As you mentioned just a minute ago, the decline of the US began with the Vietnam War. And you said during your presentation earlier that the US became depoliticized by the impact of the war and then further depoliticized by the events of 9/11. Do you want to explain that?

Prof. Falk: Your question raises a big set of issues. I think what the so-called “deep state” in the US, and the Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisers learned from Vietnam, were several lessons. One of them was to make a major effort to co-opt the mainstream media, including independent journalists, making the media less objective and independent, and more akin to an instrument of state propaganda when it came to public discourse on foreign policy in the U.S, especially by restricting the range of policy debate. This was one lesson.

Another lesson was to rely on a volunteer armed force, rather than to conscript individuals for short periods of involuntary service on the basis of age via the draft. These conscripts and their families became the core of the antiwar movement in the Vietnam War. The middle class, parents of children that were either students subject to later conscription or actually conscripted, and later suffered casualties and disabilities in the course of their exposure to war in Vietnam became influential voices of dissent in a war that made little sense from the perspectives of national security and national interests. An expression widely used by pro-war people was that “the Vietnam War was lost in American living rooms,” which was a part of this attempt to make sure that the media didn’t in the future show body bags and coffins coming back from foreign war zones whether the coffins carried professional soldiers or drafted American youth.

Perhaps the most important of all lessons learned pertained to tactics and weapons. Future war tactics relied on ‘shock and awe’ air attacks, coercive sanctions and an array of weapons that shifted casualties to those entrapped in the war zones, most spectacularly, the use of drones of an ever more advanced character. With media control, professionalized armed forces, and minimized American casualties resulted in a depoliticized citizenry. Nevertheless, belligerent failures continued if measured by political outcomes with the Afghan and Iraqi state-building resulting in economically costly and damaging to the U.S. claims of prudent diplomatic leadership, with benefits going to the arms merchants and militarists. The lessons learned by the military establishment in the U.S. led to a citizenry more tolerant of long foreign engagements, the era of the so-called ‘forever wars,’ but in the end there were no enduring success stories.    

These kinds of lessons learned in Vietnam were reinforced by the official response go the 9/11 attacks, which included the whole apparatus of Homeland Security, which had the effect of further insulating the society from radical protest. Another aspect of these various developments was the degree to which the militarized sectors of government and private society joined forces to depoliticize the citizenry to the extent possible to, in fact, mobilize the citizenry for a much more active role that involved exaggerating security threats at home and from abroad, even inventing them to gain support for ‘a war of choice,’ as in Iraq 20 years ago. It was this combination of these various lessons learned by the established order, while unfortunately corresponding lessons were not learned by the peace movement, which has led to the deterioration of democracy within the United States and an alarming rise of homegrown security threats evident in an epidemic of mass shootings, with over 500 in the first eight months of 2023..

The. result was a rebalancing of society after the Vietnam War, in which the peace minded and justice inclined parts of society were less affected, less active, less effective, distracted in various ways. Even by the kind of populist cultural movements that emerged in America, the Woodstock generation, Burning Man types of withdrawal from political participatio. These cultural tropes became integral to the pacification of American protest activity, in some ways a modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, although falling short on the bread dimension with respect to the poor.

Mike Billington: The fact that the vast majority, or a good portion—a much too large portion—of the population today seems to concur, both here and in Europe, to go along with this war, together with the demonization of Russia and China, would indicate that they’ve been quite successful in that effort.

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think they have been. And oddly enough, it’s the extreme right that has begun to mount the most coherent opposition to the Ukraine involvement, mainly on economistic terms, and recently accompanied by the regressive suggestion that the U.S. international focus should be on the rivalry with China, not bothering with Russia and Ukraine. Chinese success in outcompeting the U.S.in a number of key strategic sectors, endangering its primacy, is depicted as a geopolitical threat that should be the occasion for an aggressive response. From this perspective, the Ukraine engagement by the West is geopolitically wasteful, and in addition drives Russia into China’s waiting arms.

Mike Billington: The Schiller Institute has initiated and led an effort to create an International Peace Coalition, which now has more than 30 sponsoring international organizations that are committed to peace, often coming from very different and opposing political outlooks. But they have joined forces in order to stop what is increasingly apparent as the danger of a possible full scale NATO war on Russia, very likely a nuclear war, coming out of the apparently failed NATO efforts in Ukraine. Do you agree with this sentiment?

Prof. Falk: Well, I agree with the collaboration, because I think there exists what I regard as a planetary emergency that is being largely ignored by civil society. We are living with the danger of an intensified second Cold War without the kind of constraints and crisis management that prevented World War III from occurring during the first Cold War. And secondly, in this earlier period, the severity of global challenges such as global warming did not complicate the nature of the conflict. The failure to give adequate attention to global warming and the related growing frequency and severity of natural disasters poses dire threats to all of humanity and especially to the security and life prospects of youth and future generations. Suitable levels of attention along with the allocation of adequate resources in a manner sensitive to equity when it comes to bearing the adaptive burdens that must be borne if the human interest is to be served.

There are also present the war dangers as dramatized by the nuclear danger, that you pointed out, which are very real aspects of the current global setting. There is also the failure to address other serious global challenges of an ecological character. The commitment to and investment in a new arms race which is taking place throughout much of the world should be perceived as evidence of persisting dysfunctional geopolitical management of power. One barometer of such alarming developments is the recent Japanese announcement that it has adopted the highest increase in its military budget since World War II. A general heightening of the worst features of the state-centric world order are continuing, even intensifying, at a time when global cooperation for pragmatic reasons would seem to be the overriding priority of political leaders. This discouraging reality summarizes the overall picture.

This also reflects a leadership gap, with most leaders of leading countries unable to oppose trends to delimit national interests being globalized in these menacingly ways. The persistence of overinvestments in the military combined with the underinvestment in coping with climate change, migration and biodiversity, and a series of social protectjon challenges, typifies the lack of responsiveness to the real threats to human security so clearly emergent in this first quarter of the 21st century. .

Mike Billington: Regarding the war in Ukraine. You said—again, this was in the SHAPE event where you spoke, which I monitored—you said that both the US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia on the other, that both miscalculated in starting this war. I would ask, this appears to leave out the fact that the Russians had agreed to the Minsk agreements, which would have prevented the war, but which were intentionally ignored and sabotaged by the NATO nations. And also that they had negotiated directly between Russia and Ukraine through Turkey in the first months of the military operation, which resulted in an a signed agreement to stop the war in May of 2022, even before the referendums which were held in the Donbass regions to become part of Russia. But again, this agreement was just completely ignored and sabotaged by NATO. So that makes me question whether you can really say that Russia miscalculated, or were they left with no option. So what’s your view on that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I plead guilty somewhat for misleadingly using the word miscalculation. What I had in mind was that I think the Russians underestimated the NATO response, and therefore didn’t calculate in a persuasive way how their military operation would rapidly succeed at an acceptable cost to themselves, as assessed by the level of casualties, economic costs, and length of combat. When it comes to context, the provocations as you enumerated them were very great. And whether there was any alternative for Russia other than this recourse to a military solution, is a difficult question, because I think it was a part of Putin’s mindset to reestablish, as he had in Crimea, the Russians’ traditional sphere of influence in their so-called near abroad or borderland territories, as well as render protect to ‘Russians’ being abused in Ukraine. And in the course of doing this, to challenge U.S. “Unipolarity” that be best comprehended as, in effect, an unproclaimed “Monroe doctrine for the world.” Its geopolitical claim amounted to an enforced declaration that only the US could use military force outside its national territory for security or other purposes, and it any country dared challenge this purported red line without tacit or explicit U.S. permission (as granted to Israel) it would be met with retaliatory force. It was a unilateral denial of the geopolitical status to Russia and China, the signature global policy agenda of US foreign policy after the Cold War, reinforced by a new set of alliances. Overall, the U.S. response to the Russian attack was an illuminating disclosure of what was meant by the Biden/Blinken insistence on conforming to ‘a rules-governed world.’

From the outlook of Moscow and Beijing such a demand must seem a new double standard purporting to frame post-Cold War geopolitics. Putin, I would think, wanted to defy of this challenge, or at least not be bound by it. But he didn’t estimate the depth of the commitment by the Biden presidency, and its capacity to mobilize NATO countries and their publics around a defense of Ukraine.

There is also the racial factor, being that Ukraine is a white Christian country, at least Western Ukraine, which is what is essentially being defended. The U.S. Government shared an affinity with popular sentiment in a large number of European countries, particularly Poland, that were militant in their spontaneous opposition to the Russian attack. In such an atmosphere further inflamed by the complete erasure of the background provocations by a geopolitically compliant Western media. The way that Biden and Blinken presented the case for a military response to a supposedly unprovoked instance of the international crime of ‘aggression.’ Such. absolutism was further manifested by the absence of any indication of a readiness to allow a political compromise to go forward, especially after evidence became available that Ukraine had the capabilities, including the political will, to mount an effective resistance. The miscalculation on Washington’s side that became more evident in the second year of escalating combat is that the NATO West was failing despite massive investments in assistance to produce a Soviet defeat, and risking prolonged warfare or a political setback. As well, it became clear that pressing that course of action raised to intolerable levels the risk of an uningended nuclear war. These developments amounted to a serious miscalculation, actually a repetition of past misjudgments going back to Vietnam when Washington argued for a decade that one more increase of commitment by the U.S. would be rewarded by victory.

I think another explanation of the Russian miscalculation resulted from their experience in Crimea, which succeeded without generating much pushback. Putin likely interpreted Ukraine through the lens of the Crimea experience and probably believed that the comparable justification of political allegiance in Donbas would be accepted, however reluctantly. And as you suggested, given the violation and repudiation of the Minsk Agreements Putin undoubtedly felt he had a strong moral justification for acting as did, and could accomplish Russia’s goals in Ukraine in an acceptable time period and acceptable cost.

Mike Billington: Do you see that as still a possibility, that they will succeed in essentially consolidating the results of the votes of the several oblasts to join Russia?

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think to some extent, being that it is likely that will be elements of an eventual political compromise in the course of a much overdue peace dipllomacy. And I think that political compromise, as you previously suggested—even Zelensky seemed to endorse such. an approach early on—probably would include, at least in part, such an element in relation to the Dombast oblasts.

Mike Billington: Some sort of sovereignty or autonomy, at least. Yes.

Prof. Falk: Autonomy at least. And maybe given some added assurance of stability by deploying peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and near to the Russian border.

Mike Billington: You’ve already answered this, but I wanted to bring up the fact that in your earlier presentation you ridiculed Tony Blinken, who had claimed that “the concept of spheres of influence has been delegated to the dustbin of history.” I found that to be quite interesting. It’s clearly not true for the US position and its treatment of other nations. And this is certainly one of the reasons that the Global South is now looking to the BRICS and not to London and Washington for their choice of friends and collaborators. Helga has described this as a “once in a thousand years” shift. One of the top BRICS people called this a “tectonic shift,” basically the end of the 600 years of colonialism and neo colonialism dominating mankind. What do you think of that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I still think projecting drastic modifications of the geopolitical alignment in this dramatic language remains for the present aspirational rather than descriptive. I have the sense that the US-led NATO countries will react in coercive ways to the BRICS challenge, which is undoubtedly being perceived as a bigger and growing challenge to unipolarity than is being acknowledged. What this interaction will eventually lead to is difficult to anticipate. In other words, I don’t think the BRICS can mount a truly formidable challenge of the sort implied by that transformative language without encountering significant Western resistance. For these reasons, the future management of the world economy and global security will remain under storm clouds of uncertainty for the foreseeable future..

The BRICS, despite what I feel to be an overall positive development, have incorporated such new members as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. And even the original five BRICS are not fully on board with a scenario of challenging the West, that is, of creating a new world order in effect. India, for instance, is very aligned in several contexts with the West and plays a regressive role in Israel with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What one can say about Saudi Arabia being part—it’s important, of course, for the energy dimension of soft power, but it’s a horrible example of repressive theocratic governance. And what’s going on in the West African countries, the former French colonies, Niger, being the most recent military coups with anti-foreign agenda, suggests that there is still exists a lot of potency to what I call “colonialism after colonialism”—in other words, post-independence colonialism. Which I find a more graphic term than neo-colonialism.

Mike Billington: Yes, this is a description of the unipolar world, basically—under IMF, World Bank domination of the economy.

Prof. Falk: And the former colonial power—I’ve studied a bit the regional and global reaction to the coup in Niger that replaced an elected government collaborating with France. The French colonialists made it impossible for the Niger elites to govern their country in a competent way because they forbade education above a high school level, and made sure that an independent West African states would be completely dependent on French assistance in order to survive as a viable independent political entities. The resource agreements pertaining to uranium and gold together with the management of the financial system in Niger are extreme examples of colonialism in operation after political independence and national sovereignty have been achieved.

Mike Billington: But it would appear also that this series of revolts by the francophone countries is an expression of the general sentiment throughout the entire Global South, that this is it. We’re not going to tolerate colonial policies any longer. It’s liable to lead to war, and that’s the problem, as you’re saying, the colonial powers are not going to stand back and give up easily. And they could very well start another war in Africa of the sort that we’ve seen already in Europe, the Mideast, and are threatening to do in Asia.

Prof. Falk: Yes, And of course, in Africa, as you know, there’s also the so-called Wagner Group and a growing Russian factor. Russia has increased its influence. Its influence was somewhat anti-colonial, but mainly competitive with the West, and unclear in its interactions with China in Africa that seem ambiguous. It may be seen as another theater of combat in the wider geopolitical war, whose main arena is currently Ukraine.

What Russia seeks to do other than to counter the West, the French, European, and American influence and presence remains uncertain, and yet to be determined. Since these coups of the last few years (Bukino Faso, Mali, Niger) Russia appears to have maintained a kind of political distance from the new leaderships in West Africa. The African Union and ECOWAS, both supported, initially, a military intervention in Niger, as did Nigeria, to restore what was called civilian rule, which is more realistically viewed as a puppet government as serving French interests in Niger and perhaps regime stability elsewhere. There is obviously a good deal of complexity underneath the superficial reporting of these events. And that’s partly why I feel that we should view this larger vision of the global future as still at an aspirational stage, not yet clear enough to project a definite outcome, much less a consummated reality.

Mike Billington: It’s not over. But the impulse is unmistakable. Let me approach the Asia issue on that. The conference that I monitored, where you spoke with Chandra Muzaffar and Jeffrey Sachs and others, was actually called to discuss the issue of NATO moving into Asia, the AUKUS agreement [Australia, UK and US] and the Global NATO, Global Britain spreading the anti-Russia military operations into an anti-China operation in Asia. What is your view of why the leaders in the West are so hysterically trying to demonize and perhaps go to war with China? What is China’s actual role in the world today, in your view?

Prof. Falk: First, let me clarify my presence on the SHAPE webinar that your mentioned earllie. I’m one of the three co-conveners of SHAPE, and SHAPE, as its Call makes clear, has largely similar goals to the Schiller Institute initiative, as I understand it. I’ve worked with Chandra Muzaffar and Joe Camilleri for maybe the past 8 or 9 months to make  SHAPE into a viable organization. In this spirit, we’ve had this series of four webinars of which the last one was devoted to Asia, and was, I think, the most important. I think that what is at stake really is the control of a post-colonial era of world history, which is entailing regressive moves by military means, and a sense of the West’s inability to compete with China except through military means. Often wars in the past have occurred when a rising power has much greater potential than the dominant power. And I think China is seen as a rising power. overtaking the U.S. at least in the important domains of trade and technological innovation, and maybe even global influence.

Mike Billington: iThucydides Trap, it was called.

Prof. Falk: Yes. The so-called Thucydides Trap about which Graham Allison wrote an important book. There is a good deal of evidence that having nurtured this image of being number one in the world, and having that image threatened, as a source of provocation for the militarists in the West. And, through a revitalized NATO, in trying to turn back the clock of history, so to speak, the West seems prepared to pay a heavy price if measured by risks of war and ecological danger..

It is worth taking account of the underreported diplomatic success of Russia, at its July Saint Petersburg Russia-African Conference. Russia seems to have been learning from China about how to achieve win/win relationships with countries of the Global South, which seems more sensible than trying as the West is doing by devising ways to fight China as a mechanism for assuring the continuity of indirect control. I think if left on their own, Putin’s Russia would not orient its foreign policy around the military sources of power, as much as creatively develop diplomatic and economic sources of power. The West is in systemic decline. It has no alternative to its military dominance if intent on sustaining the post-Cold War status quo. This is a costly, risky path as shown by the Ukraine Crisis, and its global spillover effects. If hopes fail for intimidating China by confining its territorial expansion to its boundaries as well as continuing to accept the kind of economic warfare that has been waged against it, without retaliation. Chinese retaliation would be treated as aggression, triggering a Western response. It would be treated as a casus belli, serving as a justifiable cause of war. It’s a very dangerous situation, more so than the international situation that prevailed shortly after World War II ended.

Unlike post-1945, no precautions were taken, no geopolitical fault lines have been agreed upon. Compare this with the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at which the divisions of Europe and even Berlin were agreed upon in the course of creating geopolitical fault lines. It is instructive that these arrangements were respected by both sides throughout the Cold War. If they had not existed, for instance, the 1956 intervention in Hungary by the Soviet Union might have served as a pretext for World War III, regardless of the foreseeable catastrophic results for both sides. Or at the very least an intensified confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, we have been living in a world without those geopolitical fault lines, and risk stumbling into a mutually destructive war as happened in World War I. And that’s one of the reasons I think the aggressive global posturing of the NATO West is  extremely dangerous. One line of interpretation is to consider that these geopolitical challengers are trying to establish new fault lines fit for an emergent multipolar cooperative world order. It is plausible to think of the Ukraine war and the BRICS muted reaction to it as a natural reaction designed to put limits on what the NATO powers can hope to get away with in the future. Just as NATO seeks to deliver a geopolitical message to China and Russia, the BRICS may have decided in their own low key way to send their own cautionary message to. the West.

NATO, of course, is an anachronism. It was supposedly established in 1949 as a defensive alliance against a feared Soviet expansion at the expense of Europe. But since 1992 the alliance has been converted into a non-defensive political instrument of global scope far beyond the language of the treaty and the motivations behind it. When the Soviets dissolved the Warsaw Pact, it should have been the occasion for dissolving NATO instead of trying to revive and expand its role, first in Kosovo and then in Afghanistan, now even in the Asia-Pacific region. And of course, Ukraine. The identity of the. alliance has morphed from its origins as a defensive shield for Europe into an offensive sword for the world.

Mike Billington: You mentioned the Saint Petersburg, Russia Africa Summit, a phenomenal event in which literally hundreds of agreements were signed between Russia and the African countries, including the building of a nuclear power industry and several other industries. And of course, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been doing exactly the same thing for many years across Africa, to bring the Chinese miracle, which lifted 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, to the developing sector, to the former colonized nations of the Global South, through a focus on infrastructure development to create modern industrial nations where once there was only vast poverty. It’s clear from the BRICS meeting that the Global South has made the determination that it’s not going to accept the western denunciation of China, or that they must “decouple” from China, that they must join in sanctions against Russia—they’re simply rejecting that. I’m wondering if you have other comments on that, and how do you interpret the demonization of Russia and China across the West?

Prof. Falk: Well, I interpret this dynamic of demonization as a reaction against the perceived threat China and Russia pose to the geopolitical primacy that the US has exercised since the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a way to build domestic support for a renewal of geopolitical rivalry on a. global scale. I think we’re in a transitional moment in international affairs which will be characterized either by the end of the post-Cold War era and the beginning of something new—I suppose that’s part of what your comment on the magnitude of the change we can anticipate—or we’re experiencing the moment where unfortunately unipolarity is being reinforced, at least temporarily. In this kind of transition contradictions occur. I have long been influenced by the Gramsci insight that during periods of societal transition, morbid things happen. We’re living through this sort of interval. Its our historic destiny to do so. We have very poor leadership with which to navigate these turbulent waters even from a self-interested point of view, much less from a global perspective. Also disturbing is my suspicion that the belligerent stance being supported in Washington is as motivated by Biden’s calculations about the 2024 presidential election as by the dynamics of what’s going on in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world.

Mike Billington: The irony of this election situation is that the leading candidates in both parties, if you consider Trump and if you think of Robert Kennedy Jr as the leading candidate (even though they’re trying to ignore that he’s even a candidate, and refusing to even have any debates, treating him as a kook rather than as a serious person) but both of those candidates, Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., are openly and quite strongly opposed to the Ukraine war, to any further war in Ukraine, which certainly is a measure of the general mood of the population, despite the fact that the media and the parties are completely ignoring any kind of opposition to this war, as if it’s unanimously supported, which it’s not.

Let me make one point and see what your response is. Helga has made the point that the move from a unipolar world to a multipolar world, which is on everybody’s lips who are involved in this process, but if there’s a multi-polar world which does not end the division into two separate blocs, then you’re still going to have a war. In other words, if you don’t break down the division where the US and the Europeans see themselves as part of a bloc that has to unilaterally oppose the rise of the Global South, then it’s going to lead to war. And therefore, you have to have a way of getting people in the West to stand up against this division, against the threat of war, which was the idea behind forming this International Peace Coalition, which was to get people to come together from different political views, but to recognize that you have to sit down and talk with Russia and China and the Global South rather than going to war with them, or it will lead to nuclear war. Your thoughts.

Prof. Falk: Essentially, I find the language of Helga LaRouche too causally determined. I think there are constraints on going to war at least on the scale of World War III, nuclear war. These constraints are too weak to feel reassured, but at the same time the view that unless drastic change occurs soon war is inevitable is in my view an overstated interpretation. I think that major war avoidance remains something that even these shortsighted or otherwise limited leaders seek to ensure. I think what a failure of geopolitical clarification will do, though, is to produce a dangerous, militarized competition that the world can’t afford, and such a course would aggravate these other global problems, and not just the problems associated with the environment and with other forms of public dissatisfaction. I see this challenge of. unipolarity as basically a positive move to encourage a reorientation of the outlook of the West in the direction of the Schiller initiative proposals, as well as the SHAPE proposals. But I think it will require a very deeply motivated and mobilized civil society effort, because the entrenched, private sector forces and governmentally embedded bureaucratic elites have lots at stake, including the career and monetary benefits of militarization, media inflated threats, exaggeration of security requirements, confrontation, even limited wars. All these things help arms sales, promote the military, intelligence, and governmental sides of the elite governance structures in the West.

So. I’m not hopeful. I do think there’s one factor that you haven’t mentioned, and I keep trying to bring up in various ways. That is, the pressure from these new kinds of challenges: global warming, causing severe heat, extreme weather, deterioration of ocean quality, all phenomena that adversely affect human wellbeing, thereby creating a pragmatic basis for a cooperative multipolarity. What would benefit the peoples of the is a non-adversarial form of multipolarity. Or at least a subdued, competitive multipolarity that makes political space for cooperative solutions to common problems in the global interest. These problems seem bound to grow more severe in the near future. And thus the failure to practice a solutions-oriented geopolitics affects society in ever more detrimental ways. Even the Canadian wildfire burning for the whole summer of 2023 in unprecedented harm by way of health hazards and damage to agriculture. I think that such occurrences are of planetary relevance and should be woven into any kind of constructive vision of the future.

Mike Billington: Okay. Do you have any last thoughts?

Prof. Falk: Not at the moemnt. We have had a rather comprehensive conversation because you have posed a series of truly important questions. Thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity to express my views on this range of topics.

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War Prevention Depends on Respecting Invisible Geopolitical Fault Lines

18 May

[Initiallly published In CounterPunch on April 26,2023, later substantially modified.]

If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’

At first glance ‘rule-governed’ seems to be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America since 1823 to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a more Atlanticist perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’

Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, 2 March, 2022, in a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions including China and India) although without comparable support at the UN for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The coercive diplomacy was left essentially to NATO members, varying according to their perceived security interests, but generally following Washington’s lead in failing to seek a ceasefire and a negotiated political compromise.

What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is far less clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek peaceful settlements of all international disputes.

The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the contrasting international response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch their ‘wars of choice,’ while reserving accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended impunity benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy and double standards that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.

These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises(1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).

Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).


These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East  Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.

This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaged in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference took ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.

Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.

The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.

The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict to prevent the forcible reunification of Korea.

It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than in conflictual manner.

However unlikely it now seems, it is possible that the Ukraine War will yet be remembered for producing a transition in outlook and behavior of global rivals in the direction of nonviolent geopolitics, multipolarism, and. multilateral global problem-solving. Arguably, China is currently showcasing the benefits of an increasingly activist form of geopolitics that seems intent on facilitating conflict resolution and peaceful relations, seeking a multipolar structure of world order that is not averse to demilitarizing international relations.

 

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[Prefatory Note: This is the third iteration of an essay on the evolution of the Ukraine War, the earlier two versions published online in Transcend Media Service (TMS) and CounterPunch. The essential argument remains: war-mongering geopolitics in the nuclear age imperils species survival and suppresses the necessity for emergency action to restore sustainable forms of ecological habitability to planet earth.]

25 Oct

Ukraine War Evolves: Who  Will Awaken Rip Van Winkle?

RIP VAN WINKLE SLEEPS FOR 20 YEARS

Ukraine War Evolves: Who  Will Awaken Rip Van Winkle?

Disdaining Diplomacy, Seeking Victory

Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022 the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russia and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression’, but supplied a steady stream of advanced weaponry in great quantities to the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack and even mount counterattacks. The U.S. did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition supportive of international sanction hostile to Russia, and when this failed to gain sufficient support resorted to a range of national sanctions. The American president, Joe Biden, also breached diplomatic protocol by resorting to the demonization of Putin as a notorious war criminal unfit to govern and deserving of indictment and prosecution. This incendiary flow of state propaganda was faithfully conveyed by a self-censoring Western media filter that built public support for a Western posture of war rather than diplomacy. It did this primarily by graphically portraying on a daily basis the horrors of the war endured by the vivid portrayals of the sufferings being by the Ukrainian civilian population, something the media has been advised to avoid when dealing with U.S. regime-changing interventions or Israel’s violence and flagrant practices of collective punishment unlawfully inflicted on the Palestinian people.

This unduly provocative behavior, given the wider issues at stake, is underscored by a newly discovered West-oriented enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court, urging the tribunal to gather as much evidence as quickly as possible of Russian war crimes. This law-oriented posture is contradicted by intense past opposition to ICC efforts to gather evidence for an investigation of war crimes by non-signatories (of which Russia is one) in relation to the U.S. role in Afghanistan or Israel’s role in occupied Palestine. To some degree such one-sidedness of presentation was to be expected, and even justified given Russia’s aggression, which while irresponsibly provoked was still a breach of the most fundamental norm of international law. And yet the intensity of this NATO response in relation to Ukraine has been dangerously interwoven with an irresponsible and amateurishly pursued geopolitical war waged by the U.S. against Russia, and indirectly against China. It is so far a war fought without weapons, yet with a major potential impact on the the structure and processes of world order in the aftermath of the Cold War, further complicated by the ascent of China as a credible regional and even global rival to U.S. dominance. Such a geopolitical war proceeds on uncharted historical conditions. It is being waged in a manner oblivious to wider human security interests, and in a profound and perverse sense, contrary even to the wellbeing and fate of Ukraine and its people.

Despite the presence of these features of the Ukraine War, Western minds continue to view the conflict with one eye closed. Even Stephen Walt, a moderate and sensible self-styled realist commentator on U.S. foreign policy, and currently, a prudent, persuasive critic of the Biden failure to do his best to shift the bloody encounter in Ukraine from the battlefield to diplomatic domains nevertheless joins the war-mongering chorus by misleadingly asserting without qualification that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, immoral, and unjustifiable..” [Walt, “Why Washington Should Take Russian Nuclear Threats Seriously,” Foreign Policy, May 5, 2022] It is not that such a characterization is incorrect as such, but unless supplemented by explanations of context it lends credibility to the war-oriented, self-righteous mentality displayed by the Biden presidency, while shielding its geopolitical war dimensions from scrutiny. Perhaps Walt and others of similar outlook were striking this posture of going along with Washington’s portrayal of the Ukraine Crisis as a tactical concession needed to be in a position to propose a Faustian Bargain of self-righteousness as a prelude to endorsing support for finally adopting a diplomatic stance toward ending the Ukraine War, and abandoning the ultra-hazardous militarist path toward victory for Ukraine and defeat for Russia. Perhaps, Walt frames his argument to gain a seat at the table with influential audiences in Washington. Understandingly believing that even their dire warnings about the rising escalation risks and to improve chances of advocacy of diplomacy will otherwise not even get a hearing from the foreign policy insiders advising Biden/Blinken. 

To be clear, even if it can be argued that Russia/Putin have launched a war that is unlawful, immoral, and unjustified, the wider geopolitical context remains imperative if peace in Ukraine is to be restored and global catastrophe avoided. For one thing, the Russian attack may be as wrong as alleged, and yet conforms to a geopolitical pattern of established  behavior that the U.S. has itself been largely responsible for establishing in a series of wars starting with the Vietnam War, and notably more recently with the Kosovo War, Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. None of these wars were legal, moral, and justifiable, although each enjoyed a geopolitical rationale that made them seem sufficiently desirable to U.S. foreign policy elites and its closest alliance partners to be worth undertaking despite violating these norms. Of course, two wrongs do not make a right, but in a world where geopolitical actors enjoy a license to pursue vital strategic interests within traditional spheres of influence, it is not objectively defensible to self-righteously condemn Russia without taking some principled account of what the U.S. has been doing around the world for several decades. Antony Blinken may tell the media that spheres of influence became a thing of the past after World War II, but he must have been asleep for decades not to notice that the Yalta Agreement on the future of Europe reached in 1945 by the Soviet Union, United States, and the United Kingdom was premised on precisely the explicit affirmation of such spheres, which in retrospect, however distasteful in application, deserve some credit for keeping the Cold War from becoming the disaster of all disasters, World War III fought with nuclear weapons far more potent than the atomic bombs that so apocalyptically devastated the people and cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such compromised sovereignty of these borderland countries is descriptive of the often tragic prerogatives claimed by so-called Great Powers throughout the history of international relations, not least by the United States through the Monroe Doctrine and its extensions. In this sense, Ukraine finds itself in the long unenviable position of Mexico, and indeed all of Latin America. Many years ago the famous Mexican cultural figure, Octavio Paz, proclaimed the tragedy of his country ‘to be so far from God and yet so close to the United States.’

The UN  Itself a Vehicle of Geopolitics more the International Law

In a somewhat insightful fit of frustration, George W. Bush after a failure to gain UN Security Council authorization in 2003 for the use of non-defensive regime-changing force against Iraq, declared that the UN would lose its ‘relevance’ if it failed to go along with the American imperial plan of action, and so it has. The ambiguity as to international law arises from the UN Charter own equivocation, asserting that all non-defensive uses of force are prohibited, a position reinforced by the amended Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court by declaring ‘aggression’ as a crime against the peace, while conferring a conferring a right of veto on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. How can this right of veto be conferred on these five states, which has the effect of precluding any Security Council decision that clashes with their strategic interests, be reconciled with the Charter and international law prohibition on aggression? Of course, Bush’s frustration was more extreme in the sense that he was expecting the Security Council to sanitize a proposed unlawful war of aggression against Iraq, that is, in a fit of unipolar arrogance, this American president expected that even the veto powers would fall in line, and offer the US/UK attacking coalition the legitimacy of UN authorization. When this was not forthcoming the U.S. did not adjust its war plans, but resorted to this dismissal of the UN.

The right of exception as embodied in the constitutional framework of the UN is not some peculiar anomaly, and the failed Bush override was an unusual rebuff of imperial geopolitics that flourished after the Cold War. It was seldom notice that such developments were indirectly anticipated by post-1945 experience of international criminal law, which from Nuremberg to the present has exempted from accountability dominant geopolitical actors, even for such incredible acts as the dropping of atomic bombs on overwhelmingly civilian targets at the end of World War II. This gray zone separating law from power continues to be the accepted playground of geopolitical actors, never so dangerous as when its prerogatives, alignments, and constraints are in flux. The Russian and Chinese challenges can be best interpreted as seeking to restore the framework of geopolitical bipolarity (or modified to accommodate tripolarity) that collapsed after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This situation led the U.S. to fill the resulting vacuum with a militarist/neoliberal form of geopolitical management consisting of full spectrum dominance of the instruments of warfare and an ideological insistence that the legitimacy of the internal political order of a sovereign state depended on its adherence to a market-driven logic of private sector dominance at home and internationally, the s0-called ‘Washington consensus.’ The momentous open question, aside from worrying about how and when the war in Ukraine will end, is whether the geopolitical world order resting on U.S. primacy will be confirmed or modified. If confirmed it will extend the period of unipolarity that followed the end of the Cold War. If modified, it will usher in a new era of geopolitics requiring a new framework of meta-legal accommodation. In either case, there exists the additional uncertainty as to whether post-Ukraine world order will be oriented toward cooperation and the production of global common goods or with hegemonic and conflictual priorities.

Geopolitical Practice: Prudent or Irresponsible

These considerations are mentioned here not to defend, much less exonerate Russia, but to show that the world order context of the Ukraine War is deeply problematic in relation to U.S./NATO claims of normative authority, especially when invoked in such a partisan manner. In contemporary geopolitical relations, as distinct from normal state-to-state or international relations, precedent and Great Power experience generally act as substitutes for norms and rule-governed behavior, at least on matters of peace, national security, and public economic policy. What the U.S. claims the right to do and does, can be generally done subsequently by other sovereign states, especially those with some level of geopolitical entitlement. Blinken has again muddied the waters of international discourse by falsely claiming that the U.S., unlike adversaries China and Russia, is as observant of rule-governed behavior in a similar manner to that regulating the behavior of ‘normal states’ in relation to matters of vital strategic interests

To gain a clearer and more objective perspective on aspects of Russian behavior in Ukraine it seems appropriate to look back at NATO’s clearly unlawful war of 1999. This non-defensive war, unauthorized by the UN, fragmented Serbia by coercively supporting Kosovo’s claimed right of secession, including political independence and territorial sovereignty. Account should be taken of this Kosovo precedent before uncritically condemning the Russian annexation of four parts of eastern Ukraine, rationalized as the exercise of rights of self-determination in the light of alleged Serbian abuse, and supposedly validated by after administering widely condemned referenda. Yet even here an understanding of past geopolitical behavior is instructive. The NATO military victory didn’t even bother with a referendum before implementing Kosovo’s secession.

The point is not to condemn all such undertakings without legal authority by recognizing that there may be extreme cases where the fragmentation of existing states is justifiable on humanitarian grounds and others where it is not, but to claim that Russia overstepped the limits of law in a context where power has been consistently shaping behavior and political outcomes in similar cases is to prepare the public for a wider war rather than leading it to seek and be pragmatically receptive to a diplomatic compromise. In effect, I am arguing for the wisdom and virtue of what might be described as geopolitical humility and self-restraint: do not require of others, what you have yourself done, or at the very least explain non-polemically what is the difference between say Dombas and Kosovo that makes the former unlawful and illegitimate and the latter lawful and legitimate. In the complexity of internal struggles of a beleaguered ethnic or religious minority it is along the same lines helpful to acknowledge that Moscow and Washington ‘see’ the same realities of the Dombas and Kosovo in contradictory ways.

This contextual understanding of the Ukraine War is in my judgment highly relevant as it makes the current fashion of mounting legal, moral, and political arguments of condemnation distract attention and energies from following otherwise rational, prudent, and pragmatic courses of action, which from day one of the attack on Ukraine strongly supported the wisdom of making an all-out effort to achieve an immediate ceasefire followed by negotiations aiming at durable political compromises not only between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe/U.S. and Russia. That the U.S. Government never to this day has publicly manifested any such interest, much less setting forth a commitment to stopping the killing and devastation by encouraging diplomacy, in the face of mounting costs and escalation risks associated with prolonging the warfare in Ukraine. Such geopolitical recklessness should be shocking to the conscience of peace-minded persons and patriots of humanity everywhere.

Beyond the immediate zones of combat, catastrophic costs are presently being borne by many vulnerable societies throughout the world from the spillover effects of the war, magnified by anti-Russian sanctions and their major impact on food and energy supplies and pricing. Such a deplorable situation, likely to get worse as the war goes on and likely intensified in the coming Winter months. Beyond this it is now also bringing closer to reality the growing danger of the use of nuclear weapons as Putin’s alternatives may be narrowing to a personal willingness to accept responsibility for a Russian defeat or to give up his status as autocratic leader. While not relenting a bit on implementing an aggressive approach to gaining Ukraine’s ambitions of victory, Biden himself incredibly acknowledges that any use of even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine would with near certitude lead to Armageddon. This paradoxical duality (combining escalating the war and anxiety as to where it might lead) seems more like a mindless embrace of geopolitical insanity than a sobering balancing of the contradictory somber realities at stake in Ukraine. We can ask when will this Rip Van Winkle of our time awaken to the realities of the nuclear age?

As always actions speak louder than words. Blinken facing a rising public clamor for negotiations, especially in Europe, responds with his usual feckless evasions. In this instance, contending that since Ukraine is the victim of Russian aggression it alone has the authority to seek a diplomatic resolution and the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine’s maximal war aims, supposedly, for as long as and for whatever it takes, including recently even the extension of Ukraine war aims to the recovery of Crimea, which has been widely accepted internationally as reabsorbed by Russia since 2014.

Context also matters in relation to the conduct of the war. Its major escalation within the month of the sabotage of Nord Stream1 & 2 gas pipelines to Europe, which Blinken once more confounded by this act of sabotage outside the war zone by calling it ‘a tremendous opportunity’ to make weaken Russia and force Europe to intensify their efforts to gain energy independence. Such an operation initially implausibly attributed to Russia by the U.S., yet later more or less acknowledged as part of the expansion of the war by reliance on ‘terrorist’ tactics of combat. This latest expression of state terrorism is the suicide bombing of the strategic Kerch Straight Bridge on October 7th, connecting Crimea and Russia, a major infrastructure achievement of the Putin period of Russian leadership, as well as a symbolic expression of relinking Crimea to Russia serving as a supply line for Russian troops operating in the Southern parts of Ukraine. These extensions of the combat zone and tactics beyond the territory of Ukraine contain the fingerprints of the CIA and seems designed as encouragement of Ukrainian resolve to go all out for a decisive victory, sending Putin unmistakable signals that the U.S. remains as unreceptive as ever to a responsible geopolitics of compromise. Biden reportedly refuses even to respond favorably to Putin’s apparent initiative that the two leaders discuss their differences at the G-20 meeting in Indonesia. Biden’s characteristic response was a defiant refusal, subject only to reconsideration if the meeting was limited to negotiating the release of an American female pro basketball player being held in Russia on drug charges. The U.S. anger directed at Saudi Arabia for cutting its oil production is an additional sign of a commitment to a victory scenario in Ukraine as well as a reaction against the Saudi resistance to U.S. hegemonic geopolitics in its co-management of OPEC+ with Russia. With such provocations, it is hardly surprising, although highly unlawful and immoral, for Russia to retaliate by unleashing its version of ‘shock and awe’ against the civilian centers of ten Ukrainian cities. Such is the course of these vicious cycles of escalation characteristic of the lawlessness of major warfare! The neglect of the relevant and shameful American precedents in Iraq and Afghanistan is also integral to sustaining a war mentality under siege.

Concluding Observations

Always lurking in the background, and at Ukraine’s and the world’s expense, is Washington’s geopolitical opportunism, that is, seeking to defeat Russia and deter China from daring to challenge the hegemonic unipolarity achieved after the Soviet disintegration in 1992. This huge investment in its militarist identity as the sole ‘global state’ that best explains such a cowboy approach to nuclear risk-taking and the tens of billions expended to empower Ukraine at a time of internal suffering in the U.S. and elsewhere coexisting with such a costly expression and dangerous expression of international overreach.

Such a tragic political drama unfolds as the peoples of the world and their governments, along with the United Nations, watch this horrendous spectacle unfold, seemingly helpless witnesses not only to stop the carnage, but also to do their best to curtail the spillover and Armageddon dangers, and even to react meaningfully against the potential supreme damage to their own national destinies.

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ON LOVING THE ‘VIETNAM SYNDROME’

2 Oct

[Prefatory Note: The following post was published in modified form in CounterPunch on September 30 2022. Its essential claim is that the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ exerted a desirable downward pressure on hawkish war making tendencies for a period of almost 20 years after the Vietnam War came to end. For those in the political elite in and out of government this was regarded as a negative spillover from a mismanaged war effort in Vietnam. For the anti-war movement this was a positive sequel to a war n Vietnam that should never have been fought, and was wrongly conceived as well as criminally executed. Not surprisingly, the foreign policy establishment carried the day, erasing memories of the Vietnam political defeat, and paving the way for new military misadventures. Never, in my opinion is the country and world more in need of a second coming of the Vietnam Syndrome than at present, with pressures building for an existential nuclear confrontation more menacing to contemplate than was the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago. To be balanced in assessing the global setting, Moscow would likewise gift the world if it emerged from the Ukraine War with some durable version of a ‘Ukraine Syndrome.’]

“Why I Love the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ of the People”

The Vietnam Syndrome was a term deployed after the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War to

explain and complain about the reluctance of the U.S. Government to use international force robustly in shaping its foreign policy. This reluctance was from its first enunciations resented by the foreign policy establishment in Washington including conservative think tanks. The language of ‘syndrome’ was interpreted by powerful men to refer to what they thought of as a psychic disorder afflicting the U.S. policy establishment that needed to be overcome as soon as possible. Yet to others, situated less prominently in the power structure, including myself, the Vietnam Syndrome was welcomed in the late 1970s as major component of long overdue prudent and principled post-Vietnam advocacy of a law-oriented U.S. foreign policy respectful of the self-determination rights of the Global South and restraints on the use of international force as enshrined in the provisions of the UN Charter.

Over the years, the Vietnam Syndrome lived this double life. One proposed cure was by way of the Weinberger Doctrine for those bristling under its restraining influence, which was formulated with the explicit intention of correcting the alleged government mismanagement of armed intervention in Vietnam over the course of a full decade. What Caspar Weinberger, a right-wing political figure and at the time Reagan’s Secretary of Defense proposed in 1983, was that the U.S, should not enter future non-defensive questionable foreign wars, with the Vietnam War uppermost as an example of what not to do. The Weinberger Doctrine set forth six conditions to guide policymakers: 

            “1)The commitment must be deemed vital to our national interest or               that of our allies. 

            2)It should be made “wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of   winning.” 

            3)Political and military objectives and the ways to meet them must       be clearly defined. 

            4)As conditions change, whether the commitment remains in the          national interest must be reassessed. 

            5)Before a commitment is made, there must be “some reasonable          assurance” of popular and congressional support. 

            6)A commitment to arms must be a last resort. “

Weinberger, in particular,  was particularly critical of the incremental character of the Vietnam engagement, which he contended, almost always ends in failure. Although Weinberger, and those on the Beltway who quickly subscribed to his prescriptions for the future, embraced the doctrine as a useful formula to gain political credibility in domestic foreign policy debates as well as victory in regime-changing and state-building wars of intervention (what Tom Friedman with customary arrogance later christened as law-free ‘wars of choice’). Read carefully, there are fundamental ambiguities in Weinberger’s formulation. It was never made clear whether the Vietnam War was vital to ‘our national interest’ or that its supporters lacked ‘the clear intention of winning.’ Yet it was hoped in Washington that the Weinberger Doctrine could put to rest the idea that under no circumstance should the U.S. expend blood of its citizen or treasure on non-defensive wars in the Global South. In this crucial sense, Weinberger’s views prevailed in policy circles and even somewhat in public opinion but failed when put to the test, reaching political outcomes resembling the Vietnam War rather than the standard model of the good war, World War IL.

Despite the bureaucratic backlash against a constrained foreign policy, sophisticated national leaders in the U.S. understood there was more political weight to the Vietnam Syndrome than setting forth a formula to ensure that policy-makers would not in the future commit the country to wars it could not win. It was thus not surprising that the first words uttered by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 after a U.S. led victory over Iraqi ground forces in the First Gulf War were “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndr0me once and for all.” The implicit claim was that the desert victory in conventional warfare would demonstrate to the American people and skeptical members of Congress that the U.S. could turn its military superiority into a political victory at acceptable costs in a time span that would not tax the patience of the American public. In other words, the American war machine was revamped to gain the kind of victory is was unable to achieve in Vietnam. Bush’s enthusiasm was ill-conceived and proved disastrously premature. First of all, the Vietnam War was a war of national resistance fought against Western colonialist forces by relying on guerrilla tactics, not a defensive conventional war designed to reverse Iraq’s aggression and annexation of Kuwait. Beyond this the military phase in the Gulf War was mandated by the UN Security Council and a regional consensus, with implementation delegated to an American-led coalition of countries and limited in its goals to restoring Kuwait territorial sovereignty.  Only hawkish ideologues and unperceptive commentators could in good faith confuse the First Gulf War with the Vietnam War.

Neo-conservative intellectuals eager to exploit the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s understood that the Vietnam Syndrome continued to stand in the way of their ideological commitments to democracy promoting military interventions, especially in the Middle East, by taking advantage of what they declared to be an opportune ‘unipolar moment.’ One of its prominent advocacy platforms, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), actually recognized the political dependance of their expansionist program on ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to reawaken the dormant fighting instincts of the American public. Although PNAC didn’t itself connect the dots, the Vietnam Syndrome had withstood earlier erasure efforts, and the rapturous welcoming of unipolarity had an abstract quality that did not overcome citizen qualms about Americans fighting and dying for the sake of a geopolitical abstraction. The Vietnam Syndrome was only existentially overcome in the public sphere by the 9/11 Attacks, which President George W. Bush seized upon in a moment of national hysteria to declare the Great Terror War in 2001. These attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were, in effect, the performative reenactments of Pearl Harbor that the PNAC was waiting for. Yet once again the analogy was disastrously misleading, inducing failures reminiscent of Vietnam that doomed U.S. political efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as indirectly in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The Weinberger Doctrine and revisions of counterinsurgency doctrine may have influenced the Pentagon to substitute air power and drones for boots on the ground to the extent possible and rely upon ‘shock and awe’ tactics to overwhelm a lesser adversary quickly, but as it turned out, these tactics were no more successful than what failed in Vietnam. In the end of costly, controversial, prolonged occupations of hostile societies the desired political outcomes were not attained in the targeted countries of the Global South. Despite the Soviet collapse the U.S. continued to encounter frustration in its attempts to manage geopolitics, especially when the political undertaking encompassed a regime-changing intervention with state-building along Western neoliberal lines.   

In my view, the dominant and sensible interpretation of the Vietnam Syndrome was as an inhibition on entry into non-defensive, essentially internal wars without at least the authorization of the UN and the conformity of the mission with international law. The Vietnam Syndrome was not initially articulated in the aftermath of the Vietnam War as a warning to war-mongering bureaucrats against fighting losing wars, but as opposition to all wars of intervention and aggression. This primary meaning of the Vietnam Syndrome has been lost over the decades, a casualty of state propaganda and a complicit media, reinforced by those private sectors that benefit from militarism and war. U.S. military overinvestment had succeeded in managing geopolitical power in the aftermath of the Cold War, but its innovations in weaponry and tactics achieved no notable political victories in wars surrounding the politics of national self-determination. What should arouse deep concern is that the militarist leanings of the government are undeterred by repeated experiences of failure, and keep trying, which adds to the devastation and suffering endured at the site of the struggle, and may defer the outcome, but it does not end in victory for the foreign intervenor, and hence is recorded as yet another political defeat. In one sense the Vietnam Syndrome was an acknowledgement that in these types of conflicts, military superiority had lost its historical agency. The Era of Western Colonialism was over, or at least coming to an end.

When the elder Bush was announcing to the world the burial of the Vietnam Syndrome ‘beneath the sands of the Arabian desert,’ he wasn’t gloating over successful the application of the Weinberger Doctrine. He was celebrating the first clear post-Vietnam victory in war. The legacy of defeatism prevalent among the American people was what was annoying and inhibiting the Washington establishment, especially its lingering presence in Congress. Already a decade earlier Ronald Reagan had declared ‘[f]or too long we have lived with the Vietnam Syndrome.’ As with Bush, Reagan had no trouble accepting the guidelines of the Weinberger Doctrine. They were little more than talking points to wary members of Congress and inquisitive journalists. What Reagan opposed was the national mood of political timidity in the country that undermined the willingness of public opinion to support going after leftist adversaries in the Global South with America’s military might.

Among my current fears is that it is Russia’s attack on Ukraine that has finally nullified the calculus of restraint implicit in the Vietnam Syndrome so far as the American public is concerned, with the odd partial exception of the extreme right of the political spectrum that is less enamored of assuming national responsibility for global security than is the broad bipartisan internationalist consensus that controlled American foreign policy during and after the Cold War. Ukraine as a seemingly victimized white, European society involves an attack by a hostile rival country that has sent tremors of fear and trembling throughout other Russian neighbors, especially those in East Europe that had been coercively subjugated within the Soviet sphere of influence throughout 40+ years of the Cold War and had strong political bases of ethnic and emotional support in the leading countries of Western Europe and North America.  

Currently, the escalating Ukraine Crisis suggests that the absence of the inhibiting influence of the Vietnam Syndrome. As such, it is irresponsibly risking catastrophic consequences in blood and treasure, seemingly oblivious to the dangers of challenging the traditional spheres of influence of great powers historically accustomed to geopolitical prerogatives such as Russia. It is not a matter of endorsing Putin’s aggression, but rather concerns about the failure to exert a greater effort to make the world somewhat more insulated against the onset of major wars, especially warfare with high enough stakes to make strategically plausible the use nuclear weapons. The pre-2022 efforts to interfere in the politics of Ukraine by promoting anti-Russian moves while overlooking abuses by Ukraine toward the Russian-oriented majorities in the Dombas do not vindicate Putin but they do cast a dark shadow on NATO claims of virtuous and responsible behavior guided by respect for the territorial sovereignty of states, human rights, and a mutual concern for maintaining conditions of peaceful coexistence between geopolitical rivals.  The apocalyptic dangers now confronting the world with a greater risk of nuclear war than that posed by the Cuban Missile Crisis should also remind us that the political failure in Vietnam was primarily a result of promiscuous militarism. The geopolitical takeaway should have focused on conflict avoidance rather than avoiding future defeats in comparable geopolitical escapades, the regressive preoccupation of the Weinberger Doctrine.

Against this background, I find myself a fervent advocate of the revitalization of the Vietnam Syndrome in its populist variant, as a doctrine of existential restraint when it comes to  international uses of military force, and not only in the Global South. Rather than a ‘syndrome’ it was from its outset 50 years ago primarily an angry public reflex to a botched war effort that was intended to inhibit and even discredit future belligerent impulses in Washington.

I love the Vietnam Syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat. Yet the promise of the Vietnam Syndrome was first reformulated in a manner pleasing to the militarized bureaucracy in Washington not to the citizenry eager to prevent such wars. Future wars would become supposedly winnable if the six precepts of the diversionary Weinberger Doctrine were followed. Such an approach made some sense conceptually but it failed miserably when operationalized as in Iraq, Afghanistan. More recently any sense of restraint has been marginalized in American foreign policy deliberations when dealing with a major nuclear weapons state facing defeat on its own borders and led by a dangerous autocrat.  Privileging the righteous cause of resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine while neglecting the offsetting imperatives of geopolitical caution in the nuclear age is a stunning display of managerial incompetence in Washington that is jeopardizing the future of the entire human species. It should enlighten people everywhere about the severe dangers of taking big risks to maintain a unipolar form of world order. These risks are magnified by the dispersed possession, deployment, and alert status of first usenuclear weapons. One false step on either side and we are done for as a species.

ON LOVING THE ‘VIETNAM SYMPTOM’

[Prefatory Note: The following post was published in modified form in CounterPunch on September 30 2022. Its essential claim is that the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ exerted a desirable downward pressure on hawkish war making tendencies for a period of almost 20 years after the Vietnam War came to end. For those in the political elite in and out of government this was regarded as a negative spillover from a mismanaged war effort in Vietnam. For the anti-war movement this was a positive sequel to a war n Vietnam that should never have been fought, and was wrongly conceived as well as criminally executed. Not surprisingly, the foreign policy establishment carried the day, erasing memories of the Vietnam political defeat, and paving the way for new military misadventures. Never, in my opinion is the country and world more in need of a second coming of the Vietnam Syndrome than at present, with pressures building for an existential nuclear confrontation more menacing to contemplate than was the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago. To be balanced in assessing the global setting, Moscow would likewise gift the world if it emerged from the Ukraine War with some durable version of a ‘Ukraine Syndrome.’]

“Why I Love the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ of the People”

The Vietnam Syndrome was a term deployed after the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War to

explain and complain about the reluctance of the U.S. Government to use international force robustly in shaping its foreign policy. This reluctance was from its first enunciations resented by the foreign policy establishment in Washington including conservative think tanks. The language of ‘syndrome’ was interpreted by powerful men to refer to what they thought of as a psychic disorder afflicting the U.S. policy establishment that needed to be overcome as soon as possible. Yet to others, situated less prominently in the power structure, including myself, the Vietnam Syndrome was welcomed in the late 1970s as major component of long overdue prudent and principled post-Vietnam advocacy of a law-oriented U.S. foreign policy respectful of the self-determination rights of the Global South and restraints on the use of international force as enshrined in the provisions of the UN Charter.

Over the years, the Vietnam Syndrome lived this double life. One proposed cure was by way of the Weinberger Doctrine for those bristling under its restraining influence, which was formulated with the explicit intention of correcting the alleged government mismanagement of armed intervention in Vietnam over the course of a full decade. What Caspar Weinberger, a right-wing political figure and at the time Reagan’s Secretary of Defense proposed in 1983, was that the U.S, should not enter future non-defensive questionable foreign wars, with the Vietnam War uppermost as an example of what not to do. The Weinberger Doctrine set forth six conditions to guide policymakers: 

            “1)The commitment must be deemed vital to our national interest or               that of our allies. 

            2)It should be made “wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of   winning.” 

            3)Political and military objectives and the ways to meet them must       be clearly defined. 

            4)As conditions change, whether the commitment remains in the          national interest must be reassessed. 

            5)Before a commitment is made, there must be “some reasonable          assurance” of popular and congressional support. 

            6)A commitment to arms must be a last resort. “

Weinberger, in particular,  was particularly critical of the incremental character of the Vietnam engagement, which he contended, almost always ends in failure. Although Weinberger, and those on the Beltway who quickly subscribed to his prescriptions for the future, embraced the doctrine as a useful formula to gain political credibility in domestic foreign policy debates as well as victory in regime-changing and state-building wars of intervention (what Tom Friedman with customary arrogance later christened as law-free ‘wars of choice’). Read carefully, there are fundamental ambiguities in Weinberger’s formulation. It was never made clear whether the Vietnam War was vital to ‘our national interest’ or that its supporters lacked ‘the clear intention of winning.’ Yet it was hoped in Washington that the Weinberger Doctrine could put to rest the idea that under no circumstance should the U.S. expend blood of its citizen or treasure on non-defensive wars in the Global South. In this crucial sense, Weinberger’s views prevailed in policy circles and even somewhat in public opinion but failed when put to the test, reaching political outcomes resembling the Vietnam War rather than the standard model of the good war, World War IL.

Despite the bureaucratic backlash against a constrained foreign policy, sophisticated national leaders in the U.S. understood there was more political weight to the Vietnam Syndrome than setting forth a formula to ensure that policy-makers would not in the future commit the country to wars it could not win. It was thus not surprising that the first words uttered by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 after a U.S. led victory over Iraqi ground forces in the First Gulf War were “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndr0me once and for all.” The implicit claim was that the desert victory in conventional warfare would demonstrate to the American people and skeptical members of Congress that the U.S. could turn its military superiority into a political victory at acceptable costs in a time span that would not tax the patience of the American public. In other words, the American war machine was revamped to gain the kind of victory is was unable to achieve in Vietnam. Bush’s enthusiasm was ill-conceived and proved disastrously premature. First of all, the Vietnam War was a war of national resistance fought against Western colonialist forces by relying on guerrilla tactics, not a defensive conventional war designed to reverse Iraq’s aggression and annexation of Kuwait. Beyond this the military phase in the Gulf War was mandated by the UN Security Council and a regional consensus, with implementation delegated to an American-led coalition of countries and limited in its goals to restoring Kuwait territorial sovereignty.  Only hawkish ideologues and unperceptive commentators could in good faith confuse the First Gulf War with the Vietnam War.

Neo-conservative intellectuals eager to exploit the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s understood that the Vietnam Syndrome continued to stand in the way of their ideological commitments to democracy promoting military interventions, especially in the Middle East, by taking advantage of what they declared to be an opportune ‘unipolar moment.’ One of its prominent advocacy platforms, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), actually recognized the political dependance of their expansionist program on ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to reawaken the dormant fighting instincts of the American public. Although PNAC didn’t itself connect the dots, the Vietnam Syndrome had withstood earlier erasure efforts, and the rapturous welcoming of unipolarity had an abstract quality that did not overcome citizen qualms about Americans fighting and dying for the sake of a geopolitical abstraction. The Vietnam Syndrome was only existentially overcome in the public sphere by the 9/11 Attacks, which President George W. Bush seized upon in a moment of national hysteria to declare the Great Terror War in 2001. These attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were, in effect, the performative reenactments of Pearl Harbor that the PNAC was waiting for. Yet once again the analogy was disastrously misleading, inducing failures reminiscent of Vietnam that doomed U.S. political efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as indirectly in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The Weinberger Doctrine and revisions of counterinsurgency doctrine may have influenced the Pentagon to substitute air power and drones for boots on the ground to the extent possible and rely upon ‘shock and awe’ tactics to overwhelm a lesser adversary quickly, but as it turned out, these tactics were no more successful than what failed in Vietnam. In the end of costly, controversial, prolonged occupations of hostile societies the desired political outcomes were not attained in the targeted countries of the Global South. Despite the Soviet collapse the U.S. continued to encounter frustration in its attempts to manage geopolitics, especially when the political undertaking encompassed a regime-changing intervention with state-building along Western neoliberal lines.   

In my view, the dominant and sensible interpretation of the Vietnam Syndrome was as an inhibition on entry into non-defensive, essentially internal wars without at least the authorization of the UN and the conformity of the mission with international law. The Vietnam Syndrome was not initially articulated in the aftermath of the Vietnam War as a warning to war-mongering bureaucrats against fighting losing wars, but as opposition to all wars of intervention and aggression. This primary meaning of the Vietnam Syndrome has been lost over the decades, a casualty of state propaganda and a complicit media, reinforced by those private sectors that benefit from militarism and war. U.S. military overinvestment had succeeded in managing geopolitical power in the aftermath of the Cold War, but its innovations in weaponry and tactics achieved no notable political victories in wars surrounding the politics of national self-determination. What should arouse deep concern is that the militarist leanings of the government are undeterred by repeated experiences of failure, and keep trying, which adds to the devastation and suffering endured at the site of the struggle, and may defer the outcome, but it does not end in victory for the foreign intervenor, and hence is recorded as yet another political defeat. In one sense the Vietnam Syndrome was an acknowledgement that in these types of conflicts, military superiority had lost its historical agency. The Era of Western Colonialism was over, or at least coming to an end.

When the elder Bush was announcing to the world the burial of the Vietnam Syndrome ‘beneath the sands of the Arabian desert,’ he wasn’t gloating over successful the application of the Weinberger Doctrine. He was celebrating the first clear post-Vietnam victory in war. The legacy of defeatism prevalent among the American people was what was annoying and inhibiting the Washington establishment, especially its lingering presence in Congress. Already a decade earlier Ronald Reagan had declared ‘[f]or too long we have lived with the Vietnam Syndrome.’ As with Bush, Reagan had no trouble accepting the guidelines of the Weinberger Doctrine. They were little more than talking points to wary members of Congress and inquisitive journalists. What Reagan opposed was the national mood of political timidity in the country that undermined the willingness of public opinion to support going after leftist adversaries in the Global South with America’s military might.

Among my current fears is that it is Russia’s attack on Ukraine that has finally nullified the calculus of restraint implicit in the Vietnam Syndrome so far as the American public is concerned, with the odd partial exception of the extreme right of the political spectrum that is less enamored of assuming national responsibility for global security than is the broad bipartisan internationalist consensus that controlled American foreign policy during and after the Cold War. Ukraine as a seemingly victimized white, European society involves an attack by a hostile rival country that has sent tremors of fear and trembling throughout other Russian neighbors, especially those in East Europe that had been coercively subjugated within the Soviet sphere of influence throughout 40+ years of the Cold War and had strong political bases of ethnic and emotional support in the leading countries of Western Europe and North America.  

Currently, the escalating Ukraine Crisis suggests that the absence of the inhibiting influence of the Vietnam Syndrome. As such, it is irresponsibly risking catastrophic consequences in blood and treasure, seemingly oblivious to the dangers of challenging the traditional spheres of influence of great powers historically accustomed to geopolitical prerogatives such as Russia. It is not a matter of endorsing Putin’s aggression, but rather concerns about the failure to exert a greater effort to make the world somewhat more insulated against the onset of major wars, especially warfare with high enough stakes to make strategically plausible the use nuclear weapons. The pre-2022 efforts to interfere in the politics of Ukraine by promoting anti-Russian moves while overlooking abuses by Ukraine toward the Russian-oriented majorities in the Dombas do not vindicate Putin but they do cast a dark shadow on NATO claims of virtuous and responsible behavior guided by respect for the territorial sovereignty of states, human rights, and a mutual concern for maintaining conditions of peaceful coexistence between geopolitical rivals.  The apocalyptic dangers now confronting the world with a greater risk of nuclear war than that posed by the Cuban Missile Crisis should also remind us that the political failure in Vietnam was primarily a result of promiscuous militarism. The geopolitical takeaway should have focused on conflict avoidance rather than avoiding future defeats in comparable geopolitical escapades, the regressive preoccupation of the Weinberger Doctrine.

Against this background, I find myself a fervent advocate of the revitalization of the Vietnam Syndrome in its populist variant, as a doctrine of existential restraint when it comes to  international uses of military force, and not only in the Global South. Rather than a ‘syndrome’ it was from its outset 50 years ago primarily an angry public reflex to a botched war effort that was intended to inhibit and even discredit future belligerent impulses in Washington.

I love the Vietnam Syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat. Yet the promise of the Vietnam Syndrome was first reformulated in a manner pleasing to the militarized bureaucracy in Washington not to the citizenry eager to prevent such wars. Future wars would become supposedly winnable if the six precepts of the diversionary Weinberger Doctrine were followed. Such an approach made some sense conceptually but it failed miserably when operationalized as in Iraq, Afghanistan. More recently any sense of restraint has been marginalized in American foreign policy deliberations when dealing with a major nuclear weapons state facing defeat on its own borders and led by a dangerous autocrat.  Privileging the righteous cause of resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine while neglecting the offsetting imperatives of geopolitical caution in the nuclear age is a stunning display of managerial incompetence in Washington that is jeopardizing the future of the entire human species. It should enlighten people everywhere about the severe dangers of taking big risks to maintain a unipolar form of world order. These risks are magnified by the dispersed possession, deployment, and alert status of first use nuclear weapons. One false step on either side and we are done for as a species.

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A European Call for an end to the Ukraine War

5 Jul

[Prefatory Note The following letter appeared in the prominent German weekly, ZEIT, last week. It is written from a European perspective, calling for a ceasefire followed by bilateral negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. The organizers and the signers are almost totally drawn from the higher echelons of German intellectual and academic life. The letter does not directly address the geopolitical dimensions of the Ukraine War. As a result, it fails to cast blame on the United States or NATO for seeking a Ukraine battlefield victory or on Russia for threatening to unleash nuclear warfare. Nevertheless, the urgent call for an end to the killing and diplomacy is a welcome and valuable alternative to the idea, seemingly endorsed by leading NATO governments, of a prolonged Ukraine War even if it keeps escalation tensions at a heightened level, diverts attention and resources from climate change, and subjects especially countries in the Global South to multiple forms of severe hardship and dangerous forms of instability.]

Ceasefire Now. Negotiations as soon as possible.

Jakob Augstein (journalist), Richard A. Falk (professor of international law), Svenja Flaßpöhler (philosopher), Thomas Glauben (professor of agricultural economics), Josef Haslinger (novelist), Elisa Hoven (professor of criminal law), Alexander Kluge (filmmaker and author), Christoph Menke (professor of philosophy), Wolfgang Merkel (professor of political science), Julian Nida-Rümelin (philosopher), Robert Pfaller (philosopher), Richard D. Precht (philosopher), Jeffrey Sachs (professor of economics), Michael von der Schulenburg (former UN diplomat), Edgar Selge (novelist), Ilija Trojanow (novelist), Erich Vad (retired general, former military advisor to Angela Merkel), Johannes Varwick (professor of international politics), Harald Welzer (social psychologist), Ranga Yogeshwar (science journalist), Juli Zeh (novelist)

Europe faces the task of restoring and securing peace on the continent. This requires the development of a strategy to end the Russian war in Ukraine as soon as possible.

Ukraine has been able to defend itself against Russia’s brutal war of aggression for three and a half months now, partially thanks to massive economic sanctions and military support from Europe and the United States. However, the longer this support continues, the less clear it becomes which goals are being pursued with it. A Ukrainian victory with the recapture of all occupied territories, including the Donezk and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea, is considered unrealistic by most military experts, given Russia’s military superiority and ability to further escalate militarily.

All western countries that provide military support to Ukraine must therefore ask themselves what their precise goal is and whether (and for how long) arms deliveries continue to be the right course of action. Continuing the war with the aim of Ukraine’s complete victory over Russia means that thousands more victims will die for a purpose that does not seem realistic. 

Moreover, the consequences of the war are no longer limited to Ukraine. Its continuation is causing massive humanitarian, economic, and environmental distress around the world. Rapidly rising prices, energy and food shortages have already led to unrest in many countries. Fertilizer shortages will have a global impact if the war lasts beyond the fall. High casualty rates, many deaths from hunger and disease and destabilization of the global situation are to be expected. Warnings of these dramatic consequences are also being issued at the international political level (G7, UN). 

All western countries must stand united against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and further revanchist claims. However, prolonging the war in Ukraine is not the solution. The current developments surrounding rail transit to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Putin’s announcement to deliver nuclear-capable missile systems to Belarus, show that the danger of escalation is increasing. The western countries must do anything they can to ensure that the war parties reach a negotiated settlement as soon as possible. This alone can prevent years of a war of attrition with its fatal local and global consequences, as well as a military escalation that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

Negotiations does not mean a surrender of Ukraine, as is sometimes assumed. A dictated peace by Putin is not an option. The international community must do everything it can to create conditions under which negotiations are possible at all. This includes a declaration that the Western actors have no interest in continuing the war and will adjust their strategies accordingly. It also entails a willingness to secure the terms of a truce as well as the results of peace negotiations internationally, which may require a high level of commitment. The longer the war continues, the more international pressure will be necessary to get both sides back into negotiations. The West must make every effort to persuade the governments of Russia and Ukraine to suspend combat actions. Economic sanctions and military support have to be integrated into a political strategy aimed at gradual de-escalation until a ceasefire is fully implemented.

So far, there has not been a joint and concentrated effort by the international community, the major Western players in particular, to seek negotiations. As long as this is not the case, it cannot be assumed that an understanding is impossible and that Putin in particular does not want to negotiate. In a deadlocked conflict, it is a standard practice that war parties have maximum demands or explicitly reject peace talks. The course of the negotiation attempts so far has shown some initial willingness on both sides to come to an understanding by a flexible approach to the attainment of their goals. At this point, only a major diplomatic offensive can lead out of the current impasse.

The opening of negotiations is not a justification for war crimes. We share the desire for justice. Negotiations, however, are first and foremost a necessary means to prevent further suffering in Ukraine and adverse consequences of the war around the world. Considering the threat of humanitarian catastrophes and the manifest risks of escalation, stability must be restored as quickly as possible. Only a suspension of combat actions will create the time and opportunity necessary to do this. The supreme importance of this goal demands that we rise to the challenge and do everything in our power to make an early ceasefire and the start of peace negotiations possible – and refrain from doing anything that contradicts this goal.

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Make Peace, Not War, in Ukraine 

31 Mar

[Prefatory Note: this post is a modified version of an opinion piece published in CounterPunch on March 30, 2022.]

Russia launched its massive invasion of Ukraine on February 24 flagrantly violating the most fundamental norm of international law—the prohibition of recourse to international force encroaching upon the territory of a sovereign state except in exercising the right of self-defense against a prior armed attack. Yes, there were a series of irresponsible provocations by NATO that aroused understandable security concerns in Moscow, including the relentless expansion of the Cold War NATO alliance after the Cold War was over, the threat from the Soviet Union had disappeared, and promises were made by Western leaders to Gorbachev of no further NATO expansion. Such geopolitical behavior amounted to imprudent statecraft by the West, especially given Russian historical anxieties about being surrounded and attacked by hostile forces. Such eminent public figures as George Kennan, Jack Matlock (respected former U.S. ambassador to Russia), and even Henry Kissinger issued warnings to this effect, but they went unheeded in Washington.

The Ukraine War is best understood and interpreted as a two-level war. In the active combat zones of Ukraine, it is a devastating traditional war between Russia and Ukraine producing an increasingly severe humanitarian crisis that includes massive civilian displacement taking the dual form of refugee flows over Ukraine’s borders and internal movements away from embattled cities and throughout the country.

This primary war phenomenon interacts with, and in some respects contradicts, an ongoing secondary proxy war pitting Russia against the United States, with Russia trying to impose its will on Ukraine and the U.S. pursuing several geopolitical objectives additional to the support of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty. These include revitalizing and strengthening NATO and mobilizing unity in Europe by inflaming anti-Russian sentiments, which as during the Cold War rested on fear and loathing of Russia, then the Soviet Union. There is no military engagement at this point in the proxy war, although its ideological confrontations, while avoiding direct violence at present, run the risk of escalating dangerously in various directions, including putting inhibitions on nuclear threats and risks to their greatest test since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It should be appreciated that the fog of war is denser in the secret sessions of proxy war advisors and leaders than even what is hovering over the Ukrainian battlefields. Strategic objectives in this two-level war are confusing, being neither coherent nor consistent, and because there are no current images of death and destruction, the very real negative effects of the proxy war tend to be ignored, such as prolonging the killing, delaying a ceasefire.

In this proxy war, Russia is seeking to reestablish its traditional sphere of influence over the Russian ‘near abroad’ in Ukraine and the U.S. is determined to frustrate this Russian mission, although at a high cost to Ukrainians. The U.S., along with other NATO members, is doing this by sending weapons and other forms of assistance to help the Ukrainians resist more effectively. In addition, strong sanctions are being imposed on Russia with the announced intention of exerting enough economic and political pain on Moscow and Putin to make Russia reverse course. To augment coercive policies Biden, in particular has used language of incitement to attack Putin, climaxing with this outburst a few days ago while in Poland: “For God’s sake, this man cannot stay in power.” Previously, he had called Putin a war criminal, supportive of indictment of the Russian leader by the International Criminal Court, surely viewed by most of the world as hypocritical given the denunciation of the ICC for daring to investigate charges of war crimes against the U.S. in Afghanistan, reinforced by retaliatory personal sanctions imposed on the Prosecutor in the Hague and other officials of the Tribunal. 

I find both of these war strategies dysfunctional and dangerous. For Russia to impose its will on Ukraine by military force is both unlawful, and unlikely to succeed, while inflicting great harm on Ukraine and Ukrainians, as well as on itself as a result of the sanctions and diplomatic pushback. One symbolic result has been the activation of the International Criminal Court in pursuit of an indictment of Putin. Some critics are urging. the UN to establish the type of tribunal used to prosecute surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg after World War II. Although these gestures towards accountability for international crimes are plausibly associated with the Russian leader’s behavior, their wider credibility is gravely compromised as mentioned above by moral, legal, and political hypocrisy given past U.S. comparable behavior that was carefully spared similar scrutiny.

Looked at differently, for the U.S. to pursue a militarist strategy toward Russia in this manner is to choose a path leading toward frustration and danger, drawn out humanitarian suffering in Ukraine, disastrous economic spillover effects already leading to food insecurity throughout the Middle East and North Africa by way of spikes in  prices and shortages, renewed pressures to turn to nuclear power and fossil fuels in the vain search for energy independence, and the likelihood of inducing a severe global recession coupled with an escalation of geopolitical tensions of the West with Russia and possibly China. In other words, these antagonists on the geopolitical level of conflict are on a treacherous collision course, with only China so far acting prudently throughout the crisis, remaining on the sidelines, unwilling to give either Russia assistance or to endorse its flagrant violations of Ukrainian sovereignty while opposing sanctions and punitive action directed at Russia.

There is another, better way to proceed to resolve the Ukraine crisis. Russia should have learned from its earlier Afghanistan invasion that military superiority cannot overcome determined national resistance, particularly if externally supported. This is the unlearned lesson for the U.S. of the Vietnam War and all subsequent regime-changing wars of the Ukraine variant. The political outcomes of the Iraq War of 2003 and the costly failure of the prolonged effort to keep the Taliban from power in Afghanistan were reminders that military superiority had lost its historical agency in the post-colonial world. Such a recognition by Washington while long overdue, yet not forthcoming, which means the likelihood of future failures of a similar kind.

At the same time, the U.S. has been losing out globally, overplaying its geopolitical hand ever since the end of the Cold War. Instead of dissolving NATO when Moscow ended the Warsaw Pact, it sponsored anti-Russian political forces all along the Russian border as well as taking the lead in converting NATO into an expanding offensive alliance to be used anywhere in the world, defying its European founding mission as specified in the underlying treaty arrangement. Since the Soviet collapse the alliance was being illegitimately used by Washington as a global policy tool to provide a collective cover somewhat obscuring the unilateral lawlessness of controversial U.S. foreign policy undertakings that involve uses of military force. 

The U.S. would have much to gain by shifting the emphasis from a pro-active level 2 strategy to a level 1 diplomatic approach. By this is meant that instead of inflicting pain on Russia and demonizing Putin and Russia, the U.S. should be seeking to solve the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine by opting for diplomacy and political compromise, stopping the killing as the highest policy priority, and also moving to ease the nuclear dangers associated with escalation and prolonging the Ukrainian ordeal of this Level1 war. Such a behavioral abandonment by the U.S. of its Level 2 irresponsible geopolitical tactics of confrontation and incitement would also have the great national advantage of minimizing the adverse spillover effects outside of Ukraine on food, energy, trade, and political stability.

This seems an opportune moment to renounce the triumphalist unipolar pretensions that took over in Washington at the end of the Cold War. It is time to take account of the self-inflicted wounds of a disastrous record of U.S. over-investment in the military (currently more than the combined expenditures of the next eleven countries) and under-investment in humane state-building at home. Those who seek peace, justice, and economic stability in the political sphere should explore further the restorative potentialities of a UN/international law centered geopolitics of multipolarity.

At present, neither side seems ready to move in such constructive directions. Biden articulates the Level 2 strategy of the U.S. as based on bolstering Ukraine’s military capabilities to carry on a successful war of resistance, while seeking to pressure Russia to the point of acknowledging that their leader should be replaced and Moscow renounce all security claims justifying action beyond its borders. Backing Putin into such a corner is a recipe for geopolitical retaliation, likely giving rise to an escalation spiral that comes ever closer to the nuclear threshold, which as it unfolds would lead to a Western response that was more prone to engage in the active defense of the Ukraine. Escalation along these lines would heighten the nuclear danger, amounts to starting a menacing second cold war, and seems oblivious to the risks of World War III. In the interim, climate change challenges, despite their urgency are placed once more on the back burner of international attention where they were temporarily relocated during the COVID pandemic since 2020. Put simply the opposed geopolitical postures draw on competing visions of world order: the U.S. seeks to police a unipolar world without opposition, while Russia and China in different ways are insisting on establishing geopolitical norms of multipolarity, which include the restoration of geographically proximate spheres of influence for geopolitical actors.

I find it extremely disturbing that the venerable Economist articulates support for Biden’s geopolitical approach, framed as Western support for a Ukrainian victory in a form that inflicts a humiliating defeat upon Russia: “Unfortunately, Ukraine’s Western backers are dragging their feet–reluctant, it seems, to provoke Russia or bear the cost of sanctions. That is reprehensibly short-sighted. A decisive Ukrainian victory is more likely to lead to a stable peace. And by dealing what may be a terminal blow to three centuries of Russian imperialism, it could also transform the security of Europe.” [March 31, 2022] Such a logic is oblivious to Ukrainian suffering arising from a prolonged war, the severity of severe spillover costs to Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the world economy, as well as dangerously stressing geopolitics with high probabilities of escalation in the short-run including heightened risks of breaching nuclear red lines and in the longer run of stimulating a resurgent militarism experienced as a new cold war that diverts the world from climate change and other global challenges. Never has it seemed more beneficial ‘to give peace a chance’ not by such militarist thinking, but by a turn to imaginatively flexible diplomacy. If the The Economist editorial is a reflection of a consensus prevailing in Western political elite circles, we are all in for a dismal future.  

  

These concerns are aggravated by other factors in the broader international context. The UN has been sidelined, international law is flouted, and the killing goes on. Only transnational civil society in the form of public pressure from within the main geopolitical antagonists can bring these two governments to their senses and end this terrible two-level struggle. A few countries, among them Turkey, could offer to mediate peace negotiations to end the Level 1 Ukrainian War but the Level 2 antagonists seem stubbornly entrapped in their lose/lose war paradigm. As long as this is so, Ukrainians will continue to die and the peoples of the world suffer from the immediate and more deferred consequence of dysfunctional geopolitics.

 

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A Peacemaker for Ukraine: Turkey?

20 Mar

[Prefatory Note: This short post is my response to Michael Klare’s helpfully clarifying article that appeared in the March 17 The Nation:

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ceasefire-peace-negotiations-ukraine/

I limit my response to the question as to whether Turkey, specifically its controversial Pressident, Recep Teyyip Erdogan, could perform effectively as a mediating third-party between Ukraine and Russia in negotiations for a long-term peace arrangement.]

A Response to Michael Klare: Choosing Diplomacy in Ukraine

I share Michael Klare’s typically lucid analysis of the situation in Ukraine condemning the Russian aggression, calling for prudent geopolitics from Washington, and according priority to stopping the killing as both a humanitarian priority and a necessary recognition of taking all possible steps to avoid escalation cycles that pose dire threats of a wider war, including a rising risk that nuclear weapons will be used. I appreciate Klare’s attempt to propose a concrete framework for implementing his approach by calling on Erdogan, Xi, and Bennett to mediate either singly or in combination. There is informed reason justifying the identification of these suggested three mediators rather than others, although the very plausibility of the proposal and the paucity of alternative calls attention to the woeful absence of constructive leadership at the global level.

On balance, I favor Erdogan over either Xi (whom I doubt would be acceptable to either the U.S. or Ukraine) or Bennett (who leads a state that has been

recently rather authoritatively declared by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to be guilty of the continuing crime of apartheid and, as well, bears responsibility for the prolonged plight of the Palestinian people, which resembles in many of its features the Ukrainian ordeal. To be sure Erdogan does not have clean hands, having regrettably pursued autocratic policies and practices, but not nearly as compromising as those relied upon by Israel or China. As a result, Erdogan seems best suited to play the essential role of presiding over a diplomacy that seeks an immediate ceasefire accompanied by efforts to achieve an agreed framework of political compromise on the underlying conflict. 

If such an approach is successful, the region and the world will relleasse a huge sigh of relief. If international negotiations led by Erdogan achieve an end to the Ukraine Crisis it will, along the way, greatly enhance the international prestige of Turkey, which would have an unavoidably demoralizing effect on the increasingly formidable democracy-oriented opposition within the country the strength of which will be tested in national elections next year. This seems a price worth paying if it is the best option for shifting the combat zone from lethal battlefields and devastated cities in Ukraine to a neutral international negotiating venue. Looking around the world there are no better alternative mediating leaders than the three individuals proposed by Michael. 

A further related peacemaking  approach would be to explore whether the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with its 57 members, could be induced to play a part in establishing a complementary process aiming at a more durable and comprehensive system of European security than currently exists, recognizing that the tragic ordeal faced by the Ukrainian people is in part a consequence of the inadequacies of U.S. led post-Cold War geopolitics, which sought to impose a unipolar security order orchestrated from Washington on the whole world rather than seize the initiative to encourage and enact a demilitarization of geopolitics, which might have been inspirationally begun by the disbanding NATO, or at the very least, declare that with the Cold War over, the sole purpose of NATO is keeping the peace.

In the end, the search is for a peacemaking and peacekeeping framework that is perceived as sensitive to the concerns of both Russia and Ukraine, and facilitates finding common ground on an impartial basis. Such an ideal framework should be contrasted to the failed Oslo ‘peace process’ in which the mediating party was the highly partisan United States. 

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