Contra Cold War Redux: Conclusion
I can sum this up in one sentence: ‘Right or wrong, we would have done (and have done) the same thing that the Russians have done if (and when) we had (and have) been in the same position.’
‘Peace, you ungracious clamors! Peace, rude sounds! / Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus / I cannot fight upon this argument / It is too starved a subject for my sword.’—Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida1
‘“I would only make one condition,” pursued the old prince. “Alphonse Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia: ‘You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!’”’—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878
‘“Let’s don’t be too hot-headed and let’s don’t have any war. Most of the misery of the world has been caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were all about.”’—Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936
I hope that, by now, you see how half-truthful and just plain untruthful American coverage of current events and recent history has been. Or, as the radio broadcaster Paul Harvey would put it, ‘Now you know the rest of the story…’
Since the far-right/foreign-backed Euromaidan, the Ukrainians have been playing a dangerous game, accepting weapons from the Americans to use against their own people and allowing the Americans to use them as a proxy to antagonise the Russians on their very border. I am sorry to say that Ukraine is no victim here and I will not be ‘standing’ with it, whatever that even means. By urging an end to the war with minimal further loss of blood and face, I am a better friend to Ukraine than any American engaging in such performative politics.
Ukraine’s ‘democracy’ is a bad joke. It has been ranked the single most corrupt country in Europe and the ninth most corrupt country in the world (and this was after 2014’s anti-corruption ‘revolution of dignity’ supposedly purged it of corruptive Russian influence). It has the only government in Europe since the end of the Second World War with members who are openly neo-Nazis. It just banned 11 opposition parties and nationalised the media into ‘a single information platform of strategic communication,’ claiming as closed societies always do that these domestic sources of dissent were, in fact, foreign agents. I will, as a self-respecting freeman and citizen, never hold with a petty kleptocratic and autocratic ‘s—thole country’—I said it—like Ukraine, ever.
Ukraine’s ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ is another bad joke. Ukraine has never in its history had sovereignty or territorial integrity. The history of its borders is a history of endless partitions and annexations. Besides, what does it say about the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of a nation-state when large parts of said territory (eastern and southern Ukraine) are willing to fight for their own sovereignty? It was the Communists in Moscow, not God in Heaven, who drew the map of Ukraine, and they never asked the people who lived there where they wanted to live. I will, as a natural-born American (whose country’s very existence exemplifies the right of national self-determination), never hold with war against the national self-determination of any people, ever.
What is not a bad joke is the loss of innocent life in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people are not collectively responsible for the far-right/foreign-backed Euromaidan regime change and the post-Euromaidan regime in Kiev that has caused this war. Just as I condemn the Russian leadership for the invasion of Ukraine and the innocent life that it has destroyed (for whatever my word is worth), I condemn the Ukrainian leadership for the innocent life that it has destroyed in its war on its own people. Furthermore, I condemn the USA and NATO for arming the Ukrainians, training the Ukrainians, and pressuring the Ukrainians to reject the peace process and fight the Russians and pro-Russia Ukrainians as our proxies. Without the cynical interference and incitement of the USA and NATO, Ukraine would have had to settle its differences with Russia long ago.
My position is that of political-science and international-relations ‘realist’ Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, who in a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago, ‘Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?’ concluded as follows:
When I give this talk, many people in the West think that there is some deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin, who certainly has authoritarian tendencies, there’s no question about that. I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. I believe that the policy that I’m advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine and building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side and NATO on the other side is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. What we’re doing is encouraging Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West, because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way. Time is on our side. Of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this, and are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians, and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that, the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked, and what we’re doing is, in effect, encouraging that outcome. I think it would make much more sense for us to work to create a neutral Ukraine. It would be in our interest to bury this crisis as quickly as possible. It would certainly be in Russia’s interest to do so. Most importantly, it would be in Ukraine’s interest to put an end to the crisis.
Indignation against Vladimir Putin individually and Russia collectively without any self-reflection about the intent and the effect of our own actions, as well how we would have reacted were our positions reversed, is idle.
I can sum this up in one sentence: ‘Right or wrong, we would have and have done the same thing that the Russians have done if and when we had and have been in the same position.’ As just one of many potential examples, when, in 1846, Mexican troops got too close to our side of the Rio Grande for comfort, the Americans went to war with them and—in what some at the time thought was the ulterior motive for this nominally pre-emptive and self-defensive war—forced Mexico to cede what is today all of California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as part of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. By what right do we continue to ‘occupy’ that land? What plans do we have to return this land to Mexico? Imagine, if you will…oh, forget it, if you have not learned to do this yourself by now then you never will!
The West’s brinksmanship with Russia between 2007 to 2022 will go down in history as a blunder, though it is too soon to tell what will come of this blunder. ‘The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.’
Between 2000 and 2007, there was no geopolitical conflict between ‘Putin’s Russia’ and ‘the West.’ For example, in a press conference in 2001, Pres. Putin explained that Russians viewed NATO as unnecessary but not necessarily as dangerous: ‘We do not consider NATO an enemy organisation or view its existence as a tragedy, although we see no need for it. It was born as the antipode to the Warsaw Pact, as the antipode to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Now there is no Warsaw Pact, no Soviet Union, but NATO exists and is growing.’
Prior to his first international address at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Pres. Putin had, through the ‘Northern Alliance’ (which included India, Iran, Tajikistan, Israel, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) aided the multilateral NATO war in Afghanistan, but in 2003 (along with France and Germany) had refused to sanction the USA’s unilateral war against Iraq at the UN Security Council.
At Munich, Pres. Putin chided the American unilateralism that had begun to emerge after the Cold War and during War on Terror: ‘We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. Independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.’
‘The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN,’ stated Pres. Putin, ‘and we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN.’
Echoing his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, Pres. Putin opposed NATO’s continued expansion after the Cold War: ‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.’
Much had happened to worsen Russian-American relations between Pres. Putin’s first international address in 2007 and his second international address at the UN Assembly in 2015. The USA recognised the statelet of Kosovo carved out of Serbia in spite of Russia’s opposition. NATO had pledged that Ukraine and Georgia would become members in spite of Russia’s opposition. Russia went to war with Georgia in defence of the peoples’ republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which the US-backed Georgian president tried to escalate into a wider war. In 2011, Russia had been a sceptic of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in the NATO-led intervention in Libya, and in 2013, Russia intervened in Syria on the side of the state against the US-backed insurrection.2 The USA had passed the ‘Magnitsky Act,’ imposing the first round of punitive sanctions on Russia based on a highly dubious story that an expat hedge-funder/con-man told to American journos and pols.3 Last, but not least, the USA had helped to fund and direct the colour revolution against a pro-Russia government in Ukraine and then endorsed the new regime’s ‘war on terrorism’ against its own pro-Russia people.
‘We all know that after the end of the Cold War—everyone is aware of that—a single center of domination emerged in the world,’ stated Pres. Putin, ‘and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that if they were strong and exceptional, they knew better and did not have to reckon with the UN.’ According to Pres. Putin, unilateral American interventions around the world had not resulted in a ‘triumph of democracy and progress,’ but ‘violence, poverty, and social disaster.’ For example, the war in Iraq, which Russia had opposed along with the great continental powers of Europe, had thrown the Middle-East/North-Africa/West-Asia geographical region into chaos, which was now spreading into the European Union itself. ‘I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize what you've done? But I am afraid no one is going to answer that,’ said Pres. Putin. ‘Indeed, policies based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.’
Pres. Putin reiterated Russia’s intensifying opposition to the post-Cold War expansion of NATO: ‘They continue their policy of expanding NATO. What for? The Warsaw Bloc stopped its existence, the Soviet Union collapsed, and, nevertheless, NATO continues expanding as well as its military infrastructure. Then they offered the poor Soviet countries a false choice: Either to be with the West or with the East.’
In Pres. Putin’s two national addresses on 21 and 24 February announcing Russia’s recognition of the LDNR and Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in defence of the LDNR, he invoked ‘the fundamental threats which Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely, and unceremoniously from year to year,’ namely ‘the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.’
The normally phlegmatic Pres. Putin’s untempered choler in these addresses is palpable even to a non-Russian speaker such as me:
It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe.
In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns…
Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility, and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?
The Russian academic philosopher and political adviser, Alexander Dugin, has written about the duality of Vladimir Putin, portraying him as a historic leader divided between a modern Russian reformer who wants to be loved by the West and a traditional Russian nationalist who wants to be feared by the West. According to Prof. Dugin, Pres. Putin—betwixt pro-West liberals and anti-West leftists and rightists—would ultimately have to choose one or the other. Well, it appears that he has, after all these years, made his choice, and what is worse is that we gave him little choice. If, as Enoch Powell proposed, ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils,’ then the past 15 years have been a supreme failure of statesmanship.
Why do American journos and pols hate Vladimir Putin? It is not because he is a dictator. We Americans have supported dictators as bad or worse than Pres. Putin when it has been in our interest to do so. For example, the apocryphal Americanism, ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’, coulds be a reference to any one of the leaders of the numerous Latin-American juntas which the USA propped up to facilitate the extraction of resources from that country. So, Americans love a dictator when he does their bidding. In fact, we Americans loved Pres. Putin when they assumed that he would be a dictator, too—stabler than Boris Yeltsin, though no less corruptible and submissive.
American journos and pols will claim that they hate Pres. Putin because of Russia’s ‘homophobia,’ but I find this rather dubious. American allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar (which we are now cajoling to ramp up oil production after we banned Russian oil imports), as well as American enemies like Iran (which we are now debating lifting our oil embargo after we banned Russian oil imports) have the worst LGBT human-rights records in the world. There, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death; in Russia, gay-pride parades do not get permits. The status of LGBT human rights in Russia is no better or worse than in it is in Turkey, but Turkey is a NATO ally whilst Russia is NATO’s number-one enemy. Why? In any event, if LGBT human rights are the summum bonum of some journo or pol, and he/she is opposed to the U.S. of A. making devil’s pacts with homophobic Arab dictatorships which supposedly share our interests (whatever those could be), I respect that consistency and even agree to a certain extent. Americans who happily ally with the most homophobic regimes in the world but then decry Russia for passing laws against LGBT ‘propaganda’ (which, truth be told, the Red Party would probably pass themselves if they knew their judiciary would not overrule them), are just amoral opportunists.
American journos and pols will also claim that they hate Pres. Putin because he wants to restore the Soviet Union. ‘He himself said that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century!”’ they will protest. This argument, if in earnest, exemplifies the intersection of ignorance and arrogance that is the American when he/she goes abroad.
If you look at the context of this much-quoted statement of Pres. Putin’s (probably the single most quoted thing he has ever said) from his annual address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in 2005, then it is obvious that he is not a crypto-Communist and was referring to the catastrophe that was post-Soviet Russia, of which most Americans are apparently unaware:
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country's integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Many thought or seemed to think at the time that our young democracy was not a continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse, the prolonged agony of the Soviet system.
But they were mistaken. That was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.
Show me anyone who lived in any of the states of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s who would disagree with what Pres. Putin said, regardless of their opinion of him personally. The post-Soviet reconstruction of Russia can be compared to postbellum ‘Reconstruction’ in these United States, complete with foreign carpet-baggers and domestic scalawags colluding for private enrichment at public expence. Americans do not even know this history of theirs, however, so why should they know anyone else’s history?
American journos and pols hate Pres. Putin, in my opinion, because he philosophically and physically challenges our insecure self-image as ‘exceptional’ and ‘indispensable,’ meaning the belief that the rules of the ‘international rules-based order’ do not apply to us (or, put differently, that what the international rules-based order means is that we make the rules and then order others to follow them).4
For example, on 11 September 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed from Pres. Putin himself which began as follows:
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes America exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.5
Refusing to take what Pres. Putin has been saying seriously has been catastrophic for the West. Pres. Putin is no mere ‘thug’ or ‘gangster,’ as American journos and pols self-righteously refer to him. He has been a popular leader of a powerful nation-state for as long as I can remember, and even if he did not deserve to be treated with respect, what he represented deserved to be treated with respect. Now, however, after a breakdown in negotiations with the West over Russia’s national-security concerns in eastern Europe and elsewhere, Pres. Putin has apparently abandoned the multilateralism which he had advocated on the international stage for so long and assumed a hostile stance towards the West.
I would ask, ‘Is this what you wanted?’ but for many of the journos and pols determining the public discourse—many of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants from what was the Pale of Settlement with ancestral resentments towards Russia—the answer is manifestly ‘Yes.’
When he came to power, Pres. Putin proposed a new Western ‘security architecture’ which would have included Russia. Indeed, Russia would have been a strategic ally in the West’s containment of China—the real ‘clash of civilisations’ coming this century—but instead our ‘hawks’ baited the bear and drove it into a bloc with the dragon. This was not only the worst possible outcome for the West, but also the least likely. 31 years of bipartisan American statesmanship managed to force China and Russia into doing what they have never done before in their thousands and thousands of years of history.
Turns out that chess is just a game and that even a grandmaster like Garry Kasparov is not much of a strategist in the real world.
This catastrophic failure is the fault of a ‘blundering generation’ of Americans which, instead of sitting down and talking with the Russians about treating each other the way each of them wanted to be treated, puffed up its chest, stuck out its chin, curled its lip, and egged on others—the Ukrainians, who will be the biggest losers of this war no matter how it ends—into picking a fight with them. One may be forgiven for deducing from all this that it is less of a blunder than it is a betrayal.
I am told that Pres. Putin is evil. Personally, I hold with Carl Schmitt that the friend-enemy distinction in politics should be amoral and am all too aware that the Yanks have a psychological compulsion—derived from the theological compulsion of their ‘Pilgrim Fathers’6—to define their enemies as existentially and apocalyptically evil. I will, however, assume that he is evil, arguendo.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September of 1939, the French philosopher Simone Weil made an entry in her notebook:
Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity, have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in a confrontation.
As brutal, violent, and inhuman as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is—as all wars are, to which we are no exception—can you consider our own actions in Ukraine over the last eight years and conclude that we have been modeling the opposite virtues? Modeling the opposite virtues would have meant playing the role of peace-maker and supporting the compromise of a culturally pluralist, politically federalist, and geopolitically neutral Ukraine, thereby pacifying the concerns of the pro-Russia Ukrainians and the Russians themselves without the Ukrainians having to surrender any territory. Instead, we just did what the Russians did, arming and advising one side against the other—in this case, the anti-Russia nationalists against the pro-Russia separatists. At best, then, we have been less brutal, less violent, and less inhuman, though this is mostly a matter of point of view: Ask the people living in Donbas under Ukrainian shell- and sniper-fire whether we are less brutal, violent, and inhuman than the Russians. Ask the women of Velikaya Znamenka. As a patriot, I will feel patriotic when we are presenting a positive alternative to ‘Putin’s Russia,’ not merely a marginal improvement. ‘Our domestic propaganda cannot be made of words,’ according to Weil. ‘To be effective, it must consist of dazzling realities.’
Was Pres. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ‘worse than a crime—a mistake’? Would it not have been more strategic for him to have used the soft-power that Russia has over Europe through natural-gas imports as leverage? Or, perhaps, use the hard-power that Russia has to occupy the newly recognised LDNR with peacekeepers, but to go no farther? The strength of Pres. Putin’s political coalition has been its ability to deliver a modern standard of living and defend Russian national interests (both of which collapsed in the notorious Nineties), but the economic warfare which American-led international sanctions are waging on Russia will certainly undermine the former. Time alone will tell, but in any event, Pres. Putin and the Russians have been warning us since 2008 that NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia was a red line. We had every right to spurn and to spite these warnings, as we surely did, but we had no right not to take them seriously.
Already, however, the same pro-war American journos and pols who led the U.S. of A. into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other Third-World countries that most Americans do not even know that we are drone-bombing, have learned all the wrong lessons from the titanic failure of their strategy to contain ‘Putin’s Russia.’ They have argued that since history teaches that diplomatic attempts to ‘appease’ Adolf Hitler caused the Second World War,7 diplomacy with Pres. Putin is akin to ‘appeasement’ and will cause another world war. ‘See,’ they say, ‘we were right: We needed to be even more aggressive all along!’
Aside from the fact that this is what they always say about any diplomacy with any enemy under any circumstances, it must be asked, ‘What manner of appeasement this is?’
In 1933-1939, appeasement meant the British and the French allowing the Nazis to re-annex territory which had been annexed from Germany in the First World War. Since 1991, ‘appeasement’ has apparently meant NATO not expanding into formerly Russian territory which Russia lost after the Cold War. These are not the same.
There is yet another difference. In 1933-39, the British and the French actually appeased the Nazis: They allowed the annexation of a portion of Czechoslovakia (a country created by the Treaty of Versailles comprised of territories from the defeated German and Austro-Hungarian empires), shortly thereafter which the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia at large. Since 1991, NATO has not once ‘appeased’ Russia: After breaking its gentleman’s agreement with Gorbachev not to expand into East Germany, it has expanded eastward into fourteen new countries in spite of mounting Russian resistance.
The analogy, therefore, fails at every point, and it is only advanced because it is so evocative to Americans raised on comic books and comic-book history. If anything, it is NATO, in its relentless territorial expansion and monomania against Russia, that has been Nazi-like, albeit with a smiley face and a rainbow flag.
What are the conditions of ‘Putin’s Russia’ for an end to the war? Hardly analogous to 1933-1939: Ukrainian neutrality (i.e. no NATO membership), recognition of Crimea as Russian (which it was until 1954), and recognition of the LDNR as independent. The first two are what Russia has been demanding this whole time, and the third came after 8 years of failed peace talks in which time 14,000 civilians were killed in the LDNR. In my opinion, these demands are more than the post-Euromaidan regime in Kiev deserve and should definitely be accepted for the sake of all pro-West and pro-Russia Ukrainians alike. Pres. Biden should be strongly impressing upon Pres. Zelensky to negotiate in good faith, especially since NATO is not going to war with Russia.
If you are a far-right Ukrainian nationalist who, rather ironically, believes that the Soviet-era borders of Ukraine as successively drawn by Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev are inviolable, then make no mistake that there is no choice but war. First it was the civil war between western nationalists and eastern separatists from 2014 to 2022. Now that civil war has escalated into a wider war with direct Russian intervention on the latter side and indirect Western intervention on the former side. War is the inevitable result whenever a great power denies the self-determination of peoples. Eventually those disenfranchised peoples will fight for their rights, and such fights escalate as great powers take sides. War is also an inevitable result when compromise between great powers breaks down.
Yet I suspect that you, dear reader, are not a far-right Ukrainian nationalist. You may be fumbling to imitate a West-Ukrainian accent—'OOH-cray-knee,’ ‘Keev,’ et cetera—which has lately become de rigueur among American journos and pols, but you are reading this in English. You may have been propagandised by those same journos and pols that international solidarity with far-right Ukrainian nationalism is necessary to defend democracy, but you must have asked yourself at least once how it is that forcing people to remain in a political union which was created without their consent by a dictatorship which no longer exists defends democracy today.
There is an old Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ We are living in interesting times indeed. We may yet live to see the dis-integration of political and economic ties between the East and the West that were only just built in our lifetimes. In the United Nations vote to denounce Russia’s invasion and demand its withdrawal, the abstentions included not only former Soviet states like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (Belarus voted with Russia), but also Latin-American states like Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, African states like Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa (Eritrea voted with Russia), Middle-Eastern states like Iran and Iraq (Syria voted with Russia), Asian states like China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Vietnam (North Korea voted with Russia). The Arab Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar) voted for the UN resolution, but they are members of OPEC along with Russia and have rejected American entreaties to increase oil production to offset the USA’s ban on Russian oil imports. In fact, Saudi Arabia is now talking to China about pricing its oil in yuan rather than dollars, which would devastate the already-unstable American economy.
In other words, there is an emergent global bloc of the East/South against the West. The triumphalist American proclamations of ‘the end of history’ (per the neocon clerc Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest), ‘the unipolar moment’ (per the neocon clerc Charles Krauthammer in Foreign Affairs), and ‘the world is flat’ (per the neocon clerc Thomas Friedman in The New York Times) after the Cold War will be remembered for all the wrong reasons, along with ‘peace for our time’ and, well, ‘not a single inch to the east.’ None of this need have happened had the blundering generation of 1991-2022 had just followed the Golden Rule that everyone learns in Sunday School (or perhaps ‘Cheder’).
I am against the New Cold War, even—in fact, especially—amidst these warming temperatures. The Russians are not my enemies. The Ukrainians are not my friends. I, as an American, am ashamed of the antagonistic role that my government has played in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and what it is now costing the peoples of both countries. After the repressive and retarded lunacy that was ‘RussiaGate,’ however, it seems that Americans will believe anything, so long as it flatters their sense of virtue and victimhood.
Because these essays need to end sooner or later, I cannot go into much more detail on the course of the war. As with the causes of the war, the worst and the most of the fake news is coming not from the free speech of private citizens, but from the free press, which drops, picks up, and retcons narratives/plotlines with the shamelessness of a soap opera. There is a Russian proverb, ‘Trust but verify,’ which Pres. Ronald Reagan adopted in the context of denuclearisation negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev. That is, take the other side at its word until and unless its actions contradict what it says.8
I shall close with an excerpt from George Washington’s valedictory address, delivered in 1796, in which he imparted his wisdom and his wishes unto his contemporaries and unto posterity:
Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it. It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
I am against the insidious wiles of foreign influence here in these United States of America, whether it is a phobia of Russia or a philia of Ukraine.
Previous: ‘8. The Blundering Generation’
Postscript: ‘9. Saved by the Bell Drums’
Throughout history, the causes of Parises and Helens have been forcing Hectors and Andromaches to bid farewell to one another forever. Indeed, if I had to summarise the human cost of war in a single image, it would be that of Hector’s infant son, Astyanax, crying as his father holds him one last time, afraid of his father in his fearsome armour.
In the Syrian civil war, the U.S. of A. was unwittingly at war with itself. Overtly, Pres. Barack Obama’s Department of Defense was arming and equipping a coalition called the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces,’ comprised mainly of stateless Kurdish militias which previously served as American proxies in the Levant. Covertly, however, the CIA was backing other rebel militias in Syria comprised of Arabs and Turks, who viewed the Kurdish rebels as foreign enemies trying to seize Syrian land for a state of their own. When these two different American-backed rebels began fighting one another, American special-operations advisers were deployed on the ground to get their proxies under controul. The CIA was also knowingly supporting terrorists such as ‘al-Qaeda in Syria’ and ‘al-Nusra in Syria,’ because they were waging a jihad on the Russian-backed Syrian Arab Army, and the CIA considered that a greater threat than the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS). At the same time, the U.S. of A. was at war with its own allies in Syria. American military support for the Kurds prompted fellow NATO member and so-called ally Turkey to invade and fight the American-backed Kurdish militias in Syria, lest they join forces with Kurdish militias in Turkey. I learned about this from the columns of veteran war-correspondent Eric S. Margolis, ‘Pentagon and CIA at War in Syria,’ but the news also went mainstream in the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. American ‘order’ did not prevent this chaos; on the contrary, it caused it.
Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian filmmaker and domestic critic of Vladimir Putin, intended to dramatise the story of Sergei Magnitsky—the whistleblower who, allegedly, was murdered after he exposed a $230 million in tax fraud—in order to illustrate the corruption of ‘Putin’s Russia’ to the rest of the world. In the course of his investigation, however, Mr. Nekrasov came to the conclusion that Bill Browder, who had authored the book Red Notice and whose Congressional testimony led to the first American sanctions upon the Russian people since the Cold War, was covering up his own corruption. Mr. Nekrasov’s documentary, ‘The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes,’ has been de facto blacklisted, however, not by the state, but in our litigious and ignorant society no censors are needed when you have the power of the bar and the press on your side! The documentary’s premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels was canceled due to lawfare from Mr. Browder. The threat of such lawsuits from this bald-headed thug in a three-piece suit has scared venues and distributors away from the documentary. When the documentary was shown at the Newseum in the summer of 2016, Mr. Browder accused the organisers of being Russian agents and announced that his lawyers were petitioning the Department of Justice to prosecute the organisers of the event under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Meanwhile, pillars of the free press like the Washington Post furiously denounced the showing of the documentary—that is, denunciation of a documentary that the public was not permitted to see and which the press may not have even seen. I, who will always support blacklisted works because our rights/liberties must be indivisible, was able to watch the documentary on Vimeo with a password that I obtained from the producer. I understand why Mr. Browder does not want us to see it.
In the summer of 2021, a professor at the University of Ottawa wrote an op-ed for RT (which you will need to read using a VPN because of the Western blackout on Russian media), ‘Soviet collapse taught Russians the danger of being a messianic superpower. Biden makes it clear America hasn’t learnt the lesson’:
Russia has none of the ‘messianic fervor’ of Western states such as the US, its foreign minister said this week, as the nations’ leaders prepare to meet. No longer the Third Rome, Moscow is seeking a more modest role in the world.
The author Fyodor Dostoevsky had a grand vision for the country. Russia, he believed, would lead the West back to Christ and bring about ‘universal, spiritual reconciliation.’ This it could do, he felt, because its people supposedly had a ‘capability for high synthesis, a gift for universal reconcilability.’
The Russian, Dostoevsky wrote, ‘gets along with everyone and is accustomed to all. He sympathizes with all that is human, regardless of nationality, blood, and soil.’ By contrast, those on the other side of the continent, the novelist added, ‘find a universal human ideal in themselves and by their own power, and therefore they altogether harm themselves and their cause.’
Russians, in other words, seek to reconcile all, while Westerners believe their own ideals are universal and seek to spread them everywhere.
This is also a difference between Jeffersonian and the Lincolnian ‘Americanisms,’ respectively.
One may justifiably doubt such sweeping generalizations. But as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, prepares to meet the leader of the Western world, Joe Biden, next week, those different approaches to the world were on display in Russian and American public rhetoric.
First, on the eve of the G7 summit in London, which begins on Friday, the New York Times noted that Biden is casting his trip to Europe ‘as an effort to rally the United States and its allies in an existential battle between democracy and autocracy.’
‘We have to discredit those who believe that the age of democracy is over, as some of our fellow nations believe,’ the president said. ‘I believe we’re at an inflection point in world history,’ he added. ‘A moment where it falls to us to prove that democracies don’t just endure, but will excel as we rise to seize enormous opportunities in the new age.’
This is melodramatic Lincolnian-esque rhetoric—think ‘last, best hope’—in technocratic terminology in lieu of Lincoln’s KJV-esque style.
An altogether different view, however, came from Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. In a riposte to Biden’s assertion that a struggle between Western liberalism and other systems was inevitable, Lavrov declared that Russia had no interest in a competition for ideological or geopolitical domination. Moscow, he said, ‘has no superpower ambitions, regardless of how much people try to convince themselves and everyone else otherwise.’
The top diplomat claimed that the country simply doesn’t ‘have the messianic fervor with which our Western colleagues are trying to spread their “values-based democratic agenda” throughout the planet. It has long been clear to us that the imposition of a certain development model from the outside does nothing good.’
American journos and pols will smugly retort that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proves that Russia has, in fact, held ‘superpower ambitions’ all this time. Yet Russia did not invade Ukraine to become a superpower. Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent an active superpower—NATO—from further empowering the far-right regime which seized power in 2014 and emplacing a hostile military presence on its border.
To be fair to Barack Obama, when he was first asked about ‘American Exceptionalism’ shortly after he was elected, he gave a far more sensible answer, but Americans were so apoplectic that the president was not chanting ‘USA! USA! USA!’ that his advisers must have convinced him to abandon the point and just mindlessly intone the words that Americans wanted to hear.
This puritanical political theology is, in fact, descended from literal Puritan theology—from the Pilgrims who defined their theocratic colony as ‘a city upon a hill’ and ‘a light unto the world,’ and who, when they looked outside their walls, saw Satan in the ‘waste howling wilderness.’ The Yanks still see themselves as their ancestors did in 1620 (as ‘the elect’ or a ‘chosen people’ entrusted with God’s will for the world), and they still see the rest of the world as their ancestors did in 1620 (as ‘savages’ about whom God had said to them, ‘Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession’). Although this Puritan heritage, in order to adapt to the progressively non-Christian and non-white U.S. of A., has adopted politically correct language about ‘democracy,’ ‘diversity,’ et cetera, it is no less chauvinistic than it was in 1898, when the Yanks invaded Cuba and the Philippines to ‘liberate’ the Cubans and Filipinos from Spain. In the course of liberating the Filipinos, the Yanks killed 600,000 of them, and in the course of liberating the Cubans, the Yanks annexed the eastern territory of their country—and occupy it to this day in Guantanamo Bay—but the Yanks nevertheless had the sanctimony to pontificate at the time, ‘The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries…he is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, of peace and happiness.’
‘Another Munich’ has, since the end of the Cold War, become a trope in American politics, invidiously comparing any statecraft that is not unilateral and uncompromising to ‘appeasement.’ Anyone who has paid attention to American foreign policy in the last 30 years will recognise the elements of this trope. That other state is ‘doing the same thing that the Nazis did’ (‘killing its own people,’ ‘annexing territory from other countries,’ &c.) and its head is ‘another Hitler’ himself. That other state’s interests and ours are a zero-sum game in which compromise is tantamount to surrender. Peace is defeatism and/or sedition, and anyone amongst us who advocates for peace instead of war is ‘another Lindbergh or Father Coughlin.’ These, according to the American neo-conservatives, are the ‘lessons of history,’ but true conservatives would know that history is neither didactic nor deterministic.
To follow the war, I recommend subscribing to ‘Russians with Attitude.’ Although the hosts are pro-Russian—they joke that they are ‘your weekly dose of dezinformatsiya’—their coverage of the war has proven more accurate than that of purportedly neutral Western sources which are, in fact, pro-Ukrainian, and moreover, are literally laundering Ukrainian propaganda to the Western public. In my experience, sources which own their biases tend to be more trustworthy than sources which disclaim any biases, as the former is at least telling the truth in that and is also telling you what you should probably fact-check for yourself.