This essay makes the case that the ongoing political crisis in
the Ukraine is one which has the potential to explode into a
confrontation between the United States-led alliance of NATO states and
the Russian Federation.
The implications of this are grave in the extreme as this could evolve towards the use of nuclear weapons.
It makes clear that far from the Western mainstream press’s
narrative of Russian President Vladimir Putin being the belligerent
party who is seeking to create a new Russian imperium, the crisis is
actually the result of the application of two canons presently
influencing the conduct of American foreign policy namely, that of the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ and the ‘Brzezinski Doctrine’.
The former is an amoral philosophy permitting the pursuance of American
hegemony at almost any cost and the latter, is an aggressive policy
resolved to prevent the rise of any other nation as a competitor to
American global domination.
It strives to place the crisis in the historical context of
America’s longstanding financial and military domination through the
post-World War Two institutions created in the wake of the Bretton Woods
agreement and the North Atlantic military alliance, in the process
making the case that an expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
essentially functions as the enforcer of America’s financial and
corporate dominance.
It argues that NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe is in breach
of the agreement reached by American and Soviet leaders at the end of
the Cold War and that although largely identified with the previous
Republican administration of George W. Bush, neo-conservative influence
on the policies of the United States are still strong and have not only
led to destructive interventions during the Obama administration in both
Libya and Syria, but threaten through American policy in Ukraine to
push Europe and the world into an abyss.
There is a tendency, particularly on the part of his detractors, to
perceive President Barack Obama as being a temperamentally ‘detached’
individual; this a supposedly perceptible character trait that feeds
into the notion of his being broadly ‘isolationist’ in his foreign
policy stance so far as the projection of American power and authority
is concerned, and, ultimately leads to the judgement that he is a weak
leader.
Those wholeheartedly subscribing to such a view may point to his
disengagements respectively from the United States-invaded nations of
Iraq and Afghanistan; this, notwithstanding the fraudulent basis on
which the invasion of the former was based, and in regard to both, the
inordinate lengths of the respective combat engagements as well as the
colossal waste of human lives and the financial cost to the treasury and
the national debt of the country.
They may also fault Obama for ‘weakness’ by his refusal to cross the
self-designated ‘red-line’ in regard to the use of chemical weapons in
the Syrian conflict.
His ‘backtrack’ in not bombing the military command structure of the
Assad government in the wake of the August 2013 chemical attack at
Ghouta remains, to his critics, an example of the president’s lack of
resolve and courage, notwithstanding the analysis of the dubiousness of
the evidence attributing the attack to Assad’s government which
significant actors within the US Intelligence Community were relaying to
the president.
This, also notwithstanding the visible feedback relayed to members of
the United States Congress by constituents fatigued by the human and
material resources of their nation being expended on a seemingly
unending series of conflicts.
Obama of course is the president who tenaciously stuck to his guns
over his controversial healthcare reform. The man who ordered the risky
operation that led to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. He also went
back on an election promise to close down Camp Guantanamo in the full
knowledge of the level of opprobrium that would be directed his way.
He has, if anything strengthened the civil rights-curtailing Homeland
Security regime which was constructed in the wake of the September 11
th attacks
by enacting and renewing the National Defence Authorization Act and has
cheerfully sanctioned the extra-judicial assassinations of numerous
persons designated as terrorists including some who possessed United
States citizenship.
Yet, for all his supposed prevarications and what his adversaries
aver to as his ‘timidity’, the reality is that the forty-fourth
president of the United States sits at the helm of a nation which is as
far from ‘isolationism’ as it ever could be.
He presides over a foreign policy that is as firm and as
uncompromising as is befitting of a country which by its actions remains
resolved in a solemn quest to both protect and extend its global
hegemony.
The key to understanding this is to be first reminded about the
existing international financial structures and agreements which
undergird America’s global power and authority, as well as the expansion
of the military alliance which it commands and uses as the instrument
of enforcing this domination.
It is further necessary to examine the guiding principles underlying the contemporary course of American foreign policy.
Such an examination also serves to inform us of the rationales behind
the decisions to remove the leaders of certain countries and, given the
severity of their present situations, about why the fortunes of the
nations of Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are intertwined
The institutions which emanated from the Bretton Woods agreement in
the aftermath of the Second World War such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (formerly the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development), are widely considered as key levers
through which the United States maintains control over a large swathe of
the world community of nations.
Imperial in their construct and predatory in their tasks, these
bodies have been seen as the tools through which American and Western
banking concerns have effectively looted the resources of other nations
under the pretence of designing strategies which will promote lasting
and efficient internal economic practices; the benefits of which for
many only seem to be the systemisation of a neo-colonial order of
perpetual servitude through a usurious cycle of indebtedness.
Such servitude it is argued has been buttressed by the formation of
the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which is seen by some as a mechanism
geared to pave the way for the unhindered access of American-led
corporations to global markets.
The other component of American hegemony is the military organisation
known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Formed in 1949
as an alliance of Western European nations to counter the post-World War
threat posed by the Soviet Union, the alliance has in the post-Soviet
era grown even larger to cover an area farther in extent than the north
Atlantic and has absorbed more countries into its command structure.
With 28 member nations and a host of so-called ‘partnership
programs’, it is the largest military alliance in history with the
combined members expenditure amounting to a trillion dollars per annum.
The member states it is important to remind, including the former
colonial powers of Britain and France as well as the unified German
nation, remain the junior partners of the United States in this
enterprise.
While the United States may have started out dedicated to the ideals
of a renewed civilization cherishing the rights and freedoms of man and
disavowing a policy which condoned engaging in “foreign entanglements”,
its political culture would over a period of time evolve to encompass
foreign policy dictums which espoused the idea of regional supremacy.
This was the idea behind the Monroe Doctrine which was formulated in the
early part of the nineteenth century.
This would be followed by the Roosevelt Corollary enunciated at the
beginning of the twentieth century and the Good Neighbour Policy which
succeeded it.
These policies it should be reminded involved the use of aggressive
forms of diplomacy as well as the implementation of military force to
protect American commercial interests in Latin America which came to be
referred to as America’s ‘backyard’.
And when it assumed the mantle as a world superpower after the Second
World War, as it vied with the Soviet Union for global power and
influence, the United States formulated the Truman Doctrine by which it
resolved itself to ‘contain’ the spread of communism; a fear which was
predicated on the so-called ‘Domino Theory’ which served as the guiding
principle for American foreign policy from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The features of ‘containment’ as has been well-documented involved a
potent brew of fighting proxy wars, overseeing the operation of death
squads and instigating military coups.
The war in Vietnam, the murder squads of Central America, and the
violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile were
emblematic of the times.
These events were inevitably facilitated by covert actions and such
means found their most diabolical expression through the use of secret
armies and alliances with fascist groups in the urban guerrilla warfare
that was waged on the streets of Western Europe during what the Italians
refer to as the
anni di piombo or ‘Years of Lead’.
There is evidence implicating NATO and the United States intelligence
services in the atrocities which had the aim of creating a ‘Strategy of
Tension’ through ‘False Flag’ methods.
The Cold War of course ended, but the dismantling of the communist
system of government in the Soviet Union and its eastern European
satellites did not create the inexorable surge toward the reformation of
the world global community into what some postulated as the end point
of mankind’s socio-cultural evolution.
And any pretensions that the United States could benevolently bring
about such a condition; namely that of an aggregate of nations operating
under liberal democratic and free market-orientated systems has long
been put to rest.
The neo-conservative agenda which involved the promotion of these
goals is explicitly predicated on the notion of asserting America’s
national interests at the point of a gun.
This programme still persists despite the removal of identified
neo-conservative actors from political office with the replacement of
the administration of George W. Bush with that of Obama.
It is complemented by an equally uncompromising doctrine which
continues to form the basis of aggressively directing challenges at the
Russian Federation.
The two canons presently guiding American foreign policy in the
post-Cold War world may thus be identified respectively as the Wolfowitz
Doctrine and the Brzezinski Doctrine; each the creature of the belief
that American political and economic hegemony must remain unassailable.
Both geo-political strategies were formulated in the circumstances of
the United States emerging as the sole superpower after the Cold War
and both embraced the idea of a resurrected American militarism as the
means of securing its access to key natural resources.
The key tenet the of the Wolfowitz Doctrine was that the United
States needed to take advantage of the vacuum created by the
disintegration of the Soviet Union and the circumstance of being the
sole global power by increasing the amount it apportions to its military
budget and applying its vast military capability to enforce its
interests even if the result is a failure to adhere to its international
treaty obligations.
While this doctrine was centred on American policy in the Middle
East, the Brzezinski Doctrine is fixated on Eurasia. Its general premise
is based on the idea that the United States must do all that it can to
prevent the rise of another world power which can compete with it in
terms of economic and military clout.
More specifically is its fear that a resurgent Russia in combination
with China would form the basis by which the power wielded by the
Anglo-American world will be finally broken.
The application of the Wolfowitz Doctrine found expression via in the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; both of which followed the attacks
of September 11
th 2001.
These acts of mass murder which were blamed on al-Qaeda, the Sunni
Islamist movement led by Osama Bin Laden, propitiously provided the
“catalyzing event” which neo-conservatives clearly outlined in their
paper
Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000) would be required in
order to win over American public opinion to support a grand scheme of
taking out a series of Middle Eastern and North African governments
whose stances challenged the “interest and values” of the United States.
The list began with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and ended with Iran. In
between were the governments of Libya and Syria. The justification for
the removal of the leaders of regimes representing the remnants of an
Arab nationalist spirit as well as the sort of secularism espoused by
Gamal Nasser was much sounder in regard to the rationale based on shared
“interests” rather than that of “values” since there is little shared
in terms of the practised political and civic values of the Arab
kingdoms and emirates which the United States continues to prop up.
But they made sense so far as the matter of “interests” is concerned.
The United States is apt at pressurizing and even taking down those
governments that do not follow its dictates or which threaten its power.
Saddam Hussein for instance made the decision in 2000 to shift the
method of payment for Iraq’s oil from dollars to euros on the grounds
that it did not want to deal “in the currency of the (American) enemy”.
Muamar Gaddafi’s Libya, which had more control over its oil industry
than other oil-producing states and which was not beholden to the
international banking system, had begun making serious plans to stop
selling Libyan oil in dollars and instead to demand payment in a
gold-backed African currency to be named the ‘dinar’.
As was the case with Saddam’s edict, this constituted a threat to the
global dominance of the US dollar.
Neither Iraq nor Libya or the other
five states on the ‘hit list’ of countries revealed by former US General
Wesley Clark to be “taken out” in five years happened to be listed
among the member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
By contrast, American interests are served by those who operate in a
manner which preserves its economic hegemony; such as is the case with
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The relations between these nations, the
one self-avowedly democratic and republican and the other unabashedly
autocratic and steeped in medieval-era feudalism, is one that is riddled
with contradiction and hypocrisy. Yet it is a mutually beneficial one.
In 1971, with the aim of propping up the faltering dollar after
taking the US off the gold standard, President Nixon negotiated a deal
whereby the United States would guarantee to militarily protect the
Saudis in return for the Saudis guaranteeing the sale of their oil in
dollars.
The aim and the effect of this pact was to assure the survivability
of the US dollar as the world’s most dominant reserve currency.
In its quest to ensure its unimpeded access to the natural resources
of the Gulf and the Middle East upon which it will remain dependent for
the foreseeable future, the United States has overseen and alternately
acquiesced to the Saudis stirring the pot of a highly volatile region.
It is a strategy which over the course of time may lead to an all-out
regional war based on sectarian affiliations. Exploiting the Sunni-Shia
divide by fomenting conflict between both groups is a strategy
explicitly outlined in a report produced in 2008 by the Right-wing RAND
Corporation titled
Unfolding the Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects and Implications for the U.S. Army.
This ‘divide and rule’ plan, which would take place along an oil
resource rich geographical route coincident with what it termed the
“powerbase of the Salafi-Jihadist network”, would involve a “long war”
facilitated by means including covert action and the prosecution of
unconventional warfare.
A few years earlier, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Seymour Hersh
had identified what he termed a “re-direction” of US policy in so far as
its waging a ‘war on terror’ was concerned. This meant backing Sunni
Islamists, effectively al-Qaeda-linked groups, in operations in Lebanon
against the Iranian-backed Shia Hezbollah militia. There the Saudis were
the conduit through which these operations were conducted and it is the
method which has been followed in the attempt to unseat the Assad
government in Syria.
The Saudis for instance were recorded by the
New York Timesand the
Daily Telegraph as
having paid for a “major lift of arms” from Zagreb to Syrian rebels,
who are comprised of a large contingent of foreign Islamist jihadists,
in a transaction undertaken at the behest of the United States.
The fate of Syria, which for the past three years has suffered from
an insurrection that was in the words of Roland Dumas, “prepared,
pre-conceived and planned” by the United States and other Western
governments, was not helped by the Assad government’s refusal of the
plan by America’s allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to build a pipeline
from the Gulf through Syria and Turkey which would supply natural gas to
the European continent. Such a pipeline, Assad reasoned, would harm the
market position of Russia which is the dominant supplier of natural gas
to European markets and Assad did not want to undercut an ally which
has played a significant part in aiding the survival of his government.
Russian aid and support for Syria, where it maintains a base at the
port city of Tartus, has been a stumbling block to the consolidation of
United States hegemony in the Mediterranean.
The destruction of the Assad government would serve as a means of
undermining and eventually neutralising Russian power and influence; the
decisive factor which enabled Putin to prevent the United States from
bombing Syria after the incident in Ghouta. That act of Putin
doubtlessly irritated the still influential neo-conservative elements in
Washington who re-set their cross hairs on the Russian leader. The
Brzezinski Doctrine ultimately seeks to break up the Russian Federation
into smaller, militarily marginal states which would service the energy
requirements of the West. The desire to effect change in Russia for the
purpose of exploiting it for the purpose of attaining American economic
goals is a course of action which has already been attempted before the
rise of Vladimir Putin.
But evidence of the active pursuit of such a goal need not be
delimited to the period of the immediate aftermath of the post-Soviet
era when Boris Yeltsin was president. It arguably goes back to the early
part of the 20
th Century when the Russian empire was in tumult and on the threshold of revolution.
According to the late Antony Sutton, an economist and historian, Wall
Street was involved in the financing of the coming to power of the
Bolsheviks. This involvement, he argued, was based on the premise that
the installation of a socialist mode of government would remove Russia’s
ability to compete economically and, as he put it, make it into “a
captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few
high-powered American financiers and the corporations under their
control”.
The breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of the century provided
opportunities for the international apparatus of American dominance to
apply its neo-liberal economic theories to the benefit of American banks
and corporations to the detriment of the country subjected to the
therapeutic regime. This so-called ‘shock therapy’ of austerity as
applied in the 1990s by Yeltsin’s government under advise from a coterie
of American economists involved the large scale selling off of national
assets under a programme of privatisation from which only a few
Russian’s profited –leading to the rise of the oligarchs- while the
majority suffered from the drastic decline in living standards. Along
with hyper-inflation came a host of social ills such as declining birth
rates, shorter life expectancy and higher rates of suicide and
alcoholism. This traumatic episode was arrested by the emergence of
Vladimir Putin whose policies arrested the degeneration of the Yeltsin
years. After pledging in his inaugural address to impose “basic order
and discipline”, the economy was stabilised and standards of living,
aided by the implementation of state subsidies, improved.
Putin was also concerned with the restoration of Russian prestige.
His speech impliedly referred to the aspiration of regaining its status
as a military power to be reckoned with soon after NATO had bombed its
ally Serbia into submission. Russia has been a great power for centuries
and remains so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of
interest … We should not drop our guard in this respect; neither should
we allow our opinion to be ignored. By the time Putin had ascended the
presidency three former members of the Warsaw Pact had joined NATO.
NATO expansion towards the borders of Russia is a key factor in
understanding of the current crisis in Ukraine. The Russian position is
that the United States and the West are reneging on an agreement reached
during the negotiations which led to the reunification of Germany. This
is that there was an undertaking on the part of the West to former
Soviet chiefs of state not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and that
the American-led Western alliance have consistently violated this
promise. Key players on the Western side, most notably James Baker who
was the US secretary of state at the time of the negotiations, have
denied such undertakings, however, a detailed examination conducted by
Der Spiegel magazine
in 2009 of previously classified British and German documents vindicate
the Russian stance. The West appeared to be at pains to convey the
impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries
such as Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia.
The following record of a conversation involving the West German foreign minister Han-Dietrich Genscher sheds some light:
“We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises
complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will
not expand to the east. Given that negotiations were centred on East
Germany, Genscher added that “as far as the non-expansion of NATO is
concerned, this also applies in general.”
The understanding appears to have been that in return for allowing a
reunited Germany to join NATO, the West would not extend membership to
former members of the Warsaw Pact. The overwhelming majority view of
Russian political thought which is consistent through the whole
political spectrum is that the West broke its word and cheated Russia
when it was weak.
Another wave of Central and East European nations joined NATO in
2004; namely Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and
Bulgaria. Five years later, Albania and Croatia followed suit. More
wait in the wings: Macedonia and Cyprus, as well as Montenegro and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Georgia, which has a stated desire to join, has
been at the centre of the prodding and jousting between NATO and Russia.
The decision in 2008 by the then Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili
to attack South Ossetia was viewed in certain quarters as a provocation
calculated to test the Russian resolve to maintain its designated
sphere of influence. The Russians responded vigorously in what turned
out to be a bloody five-day war.
The Russo-Georgian War was just one of several episodes to result
from American efforts to destabilise Russia’s border regions. After
bombing Serbia, the American intelligence services have mounted
so-called ‘Color Revolutions’ in an attempt to portray peaceful popular
uprisings against pro-Russian governments.
These included Georgia’s
‘Rose’ in 2003, Ukraine’s ‘Orange’ in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan’s ‘Tulip’ in
2005. All of which have led up to the current crisis in Ukraine.
The cultural and economic ties of the Ukraine to Russia, together
with its historically geo-strategic importance -invaders, including
those from Germany, France and Britain have often favoured it as their
point of entry- make this the most serious confrontation to date. The
goal of prising Ukraine from Russia is a central plank of the Brzezinski
Doctrine, and the United States has worked ceaselessly in seeking to
accomplish this. In fact, in February of 2014, the Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland spelled it
out starkly when admitting that the United States had spent
approximately five billion dollars over the past two decades in this
endeavour.
This has involved the use of front organisation such as the Albert
Einstein Foundation, Freedom House and others who operate under the
direction of the National Endowment for Democracy; a hybrid organisation
whose role can be briefly articulated as the facilitating the political
subversion of foreign governments not in step with the dictates of the
United States. The present crisis was begun by the European Union’s
outright rejection of a Russian economic proposal for Ukraine which
would have involved a Russia-EU-US package.
The sustained campaign conducted by the EU in seeking to get the
government of Viktor Yanukovych to sign an agreement tying Ukraine to
the EU was doubtlessly instigated by the United States. The agreement
included a provision allowing for ‘closer associations’ with NATO. While
open to closer economic ties with the EU, he balked at a number of
conditions which were set, notably those relating to the extreme
austerity package that would have to be implemented and that which was
accommodating to future cooperation with NATO.
Yanukovych’s insistence that a balance in trade should include Russia
and his insistence that Ukraine would never join NATO resulted in
pressure being applied via the United States covert manipulation of the
increasingly violent street protests. At the heart of the protests was a
core of unemployed young people who were bussed in from parts of
Western Ukraine and whose presence was actually paid for. Protecting
them and leading the charges against the Ukrainian police at key
government establishments in the capital city Kiev where members of the
neo-Nazi group, Pravy Sektor (Right Sector).
It culminated in the coup of 22
nd February 2014 which
overthrew the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych and
installed a coalition of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis with an
explicitly anti-Russian agenda. Prior to the coup, evidence of the
involvement of the United States in this overthrow was provided by the
release of tapes of a recorded conversation between Victoria Nuland and
Geoffrey Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine during which
Nuland appeared to be determining who would and who would not be in the
government to be formed after the putsch.
Unsurprisingly, the Russians were immediately alerted by the threat
such a government would pose to its Black Sea fleet in Crimea –its only
outlet to the Mediterranean sea- if it subsequently announced that it
was going to join NATO. The result was the prompt action of the Russian
military to secure its naval base at Sevastopol and other military
establishments in the Crimea before arranging the plebiscite which
consented to the proposition that the region be merged with the rest of
Russia. The propaganda emanating from Western governments and largely
trumpeted by the mainstream Western media is to describe the actions of
Vladimir Putin as an act of aggression on par with Hitler’s annexation
of the Sudetenland instead of the measured, defensive response that it
was. The imposition of American sanctions, meagre at first but growing
as the months pass appear designed to isolate Russia and turn it into a
pariah state.
It may be interpreted as a strategy aiming for a new format Cold War
which America’s leaders perceive over the course of time would
disadvantage Russia and achieve the Brzezinski goal of marginalising
Russia to a point at which it is weakened and would have to submit to
the economic and political suzerainty of the United States. But there is
another dimension to what some analysts perceive to be the end point of
America’s aggression, and this is war. Certainly, a number of actions
of the government in Kiev who are effectively under orders from
Washington appear designed to provoke Russia into a response which
American officials have lately been saying would merit a response from
NATO.
It would seem inconceivable that the United States, through NATO
action, would wish to engage in a conflict with Russia which would
inevitably lead to an exchange of thermonuclear weapons. The accepted
view during the Cold War was that any such encounter would lead to the
mutually assured destruction of both sides. However, there are clues
that the course of American policy, again fitting into the aggressive
pattern of the Brzezinski Doctrine, in which the pre-conceived
‘encirclement’ of Russia through the United States’ deployment of
nuclear defensive shields in countries such as Poland, the Czech
Republic, Bulgaria and Turkey, is indicative of a belief that a nuclear
war can be engaged in and can be won. That these deployments are
considered as a threat to Russian security was clearly spelled out by
Putin in a February 2007 speech to the German International Conference
on Security held in Munich.
NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders. It is obvious that
NATO expansion does not bear any relation to the modernisation of the
Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it
represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual
trust. And 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?
The protestations by America that these anti-ballistic launchers were
designed to counter the threat from the overly hyped but non-existent
threat of a nuclear attack on Europe from Iran did not read as plausible
to Putin:
As we say in Russia, it would be like using the right hand to reach the left ear.
Putting American sincerity to the test, the Russians offered to share
the security burden of such a presumed threat by co-managing radar
technology that would be located in Azerbaijan on the border with Iran.
To the surprise of none, this offer was not taken up. The deployment of
such missile shields may be an important element in an attempt to
ratchet up the cost of arms spending which, as was the case with the
fallen Soviet Union, American policymakers may believe the Russian
economy would, in the long run, find to be unsustainable.
On the other hand, the idea of embarking on a nuclear war which is
winnable is not new. Back in the 1960s Herman Kahn, a director of the
Right-wing RAND Corporation, postulated the thesis that the United
States could win a war with the Soviet Union by destroying it in a
pre-emptive nuclear strike. And while major American cities such as New
York and Los Angeles would be expected to be incinerated by a Soviet
response, life would go on as it had after the Black Death had decimated
Europe in the Fourteenth Century.
It was a viewpoint which appears to have been fully embraced by a
large number of senior officers in the United States military including
General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
Curtis LeMay, the air force chief; the latter of whom according to
Robert McNamara was a proponent of “pre-emptive nuclear war to rid the
world of the Soviet threat”.
The Cuban Missile Crisis presented a means by which the likes of
LeMay felt that this could be achieved. But they would ultimately be
frustrated by President John F. Kennedy who engineered an agreement with
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
An analogy with the situation in Ukraine may not be totally amiss
given what is at stake. The co-opting of Ukraine into the Western camp
and the possibility of NATO expanding its military resources right up to
its border offends the Russians in the manner that the plan by the
Soviets to place nuclear warheads on Cuba soil offended the United
States.
While some analysts have even intimated at a revival or even a
continuum of the ‘first strike’ doctrine held by influential US
policymakers, the drift of US policy means that a situation may arise
where in order to avoid been ‘locked in’ by the ever expanding
anti-Ballistic Defence Shield (ABM) programme, the Russians may feel
drawn at some critical point in the future to exercise the first strike
option.
Indeed in 2012, the Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolay Marakov
publically stated that Russia would consider a pre-emptive strike under
certain circumstances:
Considering the destabilising nature of the (American) ABM system,
namely the creation of an illusion of inflicting a disarming (Nuclear)
strike with impunity, a decision on pre-emptive deployment of assault
weapons could be taken when the situation gets harder.
For the moment Putin’s responses have been measured. He made the
decision to retake the Crimea –a territory which has for long been part
of the Russian empire until ‘gifted’ to the Ukraine by decree in 1954-
as an understandable matter of national self-protection. And whatever
the misgivings voiced in the West about this action, it was consented to
by an overwhelming majority of the people of Crimea. Although there was
a build up of Russian forces at the border with Ukraine, no invasion
followed, even though a sizeable number of Russian speakers in Eastern
Ukraine; fearful of the edicts of issued by the illegally installed
regime in Kiev would have welcomed such a move. If any were in doubt
about this, then the war presently being waged in the eastern Donbas
Region, where in May referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were
held to legitimise the establishment of independent republics, has
convinced the majority.
The loss of civilian life is increasing as intense exchanges of
firepower occur within densely populated urban areas. A report produced
at the end of August 2014 by the United Nations’ Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimates that an average of 36
people were being killed every day.
The report covers the period from July 16
th to August 17
th.
The growing level of casualties, including a massacre in Odessa in
May when thugs of the Pravy Sektor group threw incendiaries into a
public building, has put Putin under great pressure at home.
The breach of a ceasefire on the part of the Kiev government and the
ensuing battles have created a humanitarian crisis complete with
internally displaced persons and those who have sought refuge in Russian
territory which amount to the hundreds of thousands.
This state of affairs would have been avoided, his critics argue, if
referendums along the lines of that held in Crimea had been arranged and
a Russian incursion had followed cutting across the ‘natural’ border of
the Dnieper River.
Yet, Putin has refrained from taking the drastic action of invasion.
In fact, in order to allay fears that he would opt to pursue a
belligerent course, Putin in June requested that the Upper House of the
Russian Federation revoke the right that it had granted him to order a
military intervention in the Ukraine in defence of the Russian-speaking
population. Putin’s strategy against the United States is to play a
longer game; one in which Russia is seeking to strengthen its economic
and military ties with other nations in the Eurasian sphere as well as
on the global level.
The goal appears to be one predicated not on the illusion of a modern
form of Tsarist expansionism but on the idea of multi-polarity. This
concept of a post-Cold War era world order was one to which he
explicitly alluded at the aforementioned conference in Munich.
I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also
impossible in today’s world. And this is not only because if there was
individual leadership in today’s –and precisely in today’s- world, then
the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What
is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its
basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation.
Putin criticised the United States’ “monopolistic dominance in global
relations” and “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international
relations.”
Russia is a signatory state to the Organisation for Collective
Security Treaty (CSTO) a military alliance of former Soviet states and
the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO), a political, economic and
military organisation founded in 2001. Furthermore, it is a member of
the BRICS nations which consist of Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa. And it is in with regard to BRICS that it has made a
recent contribution toward diminishing the hold over the American global
economic infrastructure. The Fortaleza summit held in Brazil in July
announced the creation of a monetary reserve fund with an initial
capital outlay of 100 Billion dollars. This Reserve Fund could in the
long run serve as an alternative to the IMF and the World Bank, and in
the process eradicate the position of the United States dollar as the
de facto world reserve currency.
It is not particularly difficult to determine that the basis of a
global conflict is a real one given the presence of certain essential
prerequisites.
First, is the existence of two distinctive ‘camps’ that are based on
divergent economic and political objectives. Second, is the motivation
of either of these camps to remodel the global economic order or
entrench the existing order. And thirdly, the existence of potential
trouble spots of which an incident whether deliberately provoked or
spontaneously evolved would light the fuse to the powder keg.
The Great War was a contest between the Triple Entente and the Triple
Alliance. And although much of the historical narrative posits the
blame on the latter; Germany and its allies, the background of an
alliance system and a rationale for why a coordinated war should be
fought on this basis can be found in the context of the British foreign
policy of the day.
This policy, although one predicated on the ostensibly defensive
sounding preservation of the balance of European continental power was
actually informed by an aggressive motive of encircling those who posed a
threat to British global hegemony.
These were the ‘Central Powers’ of Germany and Austria-Hungary which
the British sought to eventually break by constructing an alliance of
nations which would surround them.
The chief architect of this was none other than King Edward VII whose
initiatives such as the Entente Cordiale and the Anglo-Russian Naval
Convention were explicitly anti-German; so much so that he became known
as ‘Eduard der Einkreiser’: Edward the Encircler.
As the early part of the 20
th century developed, Edward
and his apostles, among them prominent politicians such as Sir Edward
Grey and top military officials like Admiral Jackie Fisher, realised
that German military and economic power would continue to grow and to
threaten British power.
The idea was to fight a preventative war against Germany and to
subdue it when a crisis suitably materialised at some point. That point,
of course, came with the events which spiralled out of the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
A century later, the alliance system of the United States, composed
on the one hand in the economic sphere with the nations of the European
Union, and militarily with those nations belonging to NATO, have set the
wheels in motion against their Russian target. A target which, as
mentioned earlier in regard to the objectives of the Brzezinski
Doctrine, has been subjected to a policy of encirclement.
The United States, needless to remind, is the superior partner in
both trans-Atlantic relationships. And what has become glaringly obvious
is the manner in which it brings pressure to bear on its European
partners to pursue actions which militate against their own national
interests.
The sanctions being applied by the EU run counter to the economic
interests of the major nations of the EU with the Germans dependent on
Russian natural gas, the British economy’s enjoyment of the financial
boost provided by Russian oligarch interests and the French who supply
the Russians with weaponry.
Further, Germany has for years pointedly stood in opposition to continued NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia.
The whiff of behind-the-scenes handwringing by the United States on a
set of reluctant allies is indicated, for instance, by the recent
protests by French President Francois Hollande over criticism levelled
at that nation’s plans to sell warships to the Russians.
Victoria Nuland’s wiretapped conversations which formed the prelude
portrayed a more aggressive stance on the part of the Americans as
compared to the EU; her now infamous “Fuck the EU” aside being
indicative of this.Nuland is the wife of Robert Kagan, a co-founder of
the aforementioned Project for the New American Century. In 2006, he
identified Russia and China as the greatest “challenge liberalism faces
today”. And his wife’s disdainful view of the EU’s ‘softer’ approach is
probably reflective of his “Americans are from Mars and Europe is from
Venus” thesis postulated in his 2003 book,
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
There Kagan controversially viewed Europeans as favouring peaceful
resolutions in contrast to the American penchant for resorting to
violence.
NATO has also been activated, first covertly, as in the case in April
of a number of Western military officials posing as observers for the
Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) who were captured and
detained by Russian-speaking separatists, and more lately the plan to
send what is termed an “expeditionary force” of 10,000 troops composed
of seven nations to be led by Britain.
In response, the Russians have not only co-created the aforementioned
monetary reserve fund under the auspices of the BRICS nations, the
collapsing relations with the EU and the United States has led to a
reinvigoration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which in August
held it largest ever joint military exercise in China’s Inner Mongolia
Province. With a set of broadly opposing alliance groups in place all
that is needed is the detonator. But if a shooting war, and not merely a
Cold War of economic attrition via sanctions and of proxy wars is what
is desired by the United States, the question which needs posing is what
the nature of the ‘New World Order’ which would succeed the present one
is expected to be?
This is naturally difficult to ascertain given the prospect of the
mutual annihilation that would be expected to result. The calculation is
that the aftermath of war would expect a realignment of the global
power structure, or from the American perspective, a reaffirmation of
its hegemony at the expense of both Russia and China.
It is clearly the case that the United State’s covert support of the
anti-Russian government in Kiev as well as of the efforts of by Islamist
forces to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad are keyed into
the notion of weakening Russian power and influence and securing
economic advantage. Both nations host key gas pipeline corridors which
are coveted by the United States and its Western allies.
The resources of both western and eastern Ukraine are highly
desirable assets which Western corporate interests are keen on securing.
The western part of the country is rich in forest land and also has the
capacity for the mass production of crops. The east, on the other hand,
is heavily industrialised, a legacy of its Soviet past, and is rich in
coal, iron ore and other natural resources.
The EU Association agreement signed in March was announced as being
intended to upgrade the Ukrainian economy, but far from exporting good
governance and efficient economic practice, it would as Russia
experienced in the Yeltsin years amount to a recipe for looting and
plundering of the country’s resources.
The scenario is an often replayed one that involves the imposition of
stringent austerity measures with attendant social spending cut-backs,
higher taxes, removal of subsidies and so on. The pressures of
maintaining a surplus budget then produces an obligation to sell off
public infrastructure at knock down bargain prices to Western concerns.
It is in order to extend the global reach of American and Western commercial interests that war is being risked.
There is another thesis to contend with, and it is that the United
States’ is coming to the end of its cycle of global pre-eminence. That
it is in decline. One symptom of the decline of empires and great powers
is, it is argued, a tendency to resort to violent means in order to
manage the faltering foundations on which its power is based.
And again far from spreading the promised freedom and democracy under
the Jeffersonian conceived concept of America as an ‘Empire of
Liberty’, those nations subjected to NATO invasion and to covert action
in recent years, can only testify to the misery and destruction that
such United States directed interventions have brought.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine have all borne the brunt of this intermeddling.
Despite the millions spent by the United States in ‘nation building’,
Afghanistan remains a troubled land with a corrupt political class and a
combustible mixture of tribal powerbases that threaten to erupt at a
moment’s notice.
Iraq has been on the verge of formal fragmentation since the
overthrow of Saddam’s Baathist government. The ISIS crisis is merely the
latest of a litany of sectarian-based violent incidents to beset the
country which include the United States directed episode involving the
use of Shia death squads to defeat an initially successful Sunni
insurgency.
Libya, once the ‘Switzerland of Africa’, with no foreign debt and a
constructed Man River Project lies in ruins; a failed state in which
rival militias violently squabble over territory and resources and in
which foreign embassies are either closed down or trimmed to a minimum.
Syria, presently subject to a civil war or more accurately, to an
invasion of mercenary Islamist death squads facilitated by American-NATO
intervention, is a broken nation with the greatest refugee crisis in
modern times and a death toll of almost 200,000. But if analyses of
American power postulating it as an empire in decline are false as
forcefully argued by Robert Kagan in a 2012 essay entitled
Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline,
the preservation of the present world order through as he put it
“constant American leadership and constant American commitment” has
unquestionable wrought malign consequences.
It is a commitment in which the export of liberty has served as a
mask for the extension of American power and the perpetuation of an
inequitable and exploitative economic order. And the instrument of
achieving this is NATO, the “hidden fist” which according to
New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman enforces the agenda of neoliberal globalisation. This
twin concept of American commercial and military imperialism is of
course not new as the aforementioned reference to the Monroe Doctrine
and its variations make clear. For many decades, United States policy
allowed for numerous military interventions of its Latin American
neighbours based on the interests of American businesses.
Friedman in fact was merely echoing the views of the retired United States General Smedley Butler who in his 1933 memoir
War is a Racket made
the following admission: I spent most of my time being a high class
muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. In his day, the
United States military served to protect and extend the interests of
concerns such as National City Bank, the international banking house of
Brown Brothers and Standard Oil. Today NATO serves to protect and extend
the interests of Western international banking concerns, oil companies
and other corporations.
Or as Bruce Gagnon of the ‘Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space’ think tank succinctly put it:
The Pentagon’s primary job today is to serve as a resource extraction service on behalf of corporate globalization.
Another useful analogy to be garnered from the ruminations of Smedley
Butler, concern the provocation of a rival nation through the use of
‘military war games’; this the technique used together with the later
implementation of economic sanctions by the administration of Franklin
Roosevelt to ensnare the Japanese into a war over the spoils of the
Pacific.
The anti-ballistic missile policy of encircling the Russian
Federation, the blatant sponsoring of a coup d’etat, the threat to
mobilize several thousand NATO soldiers as a “rapid response force” to
protect Eastern European member states ‘threatened’ by Russia’s measures
in Crimea –an arguable breach of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act
which forbids the presence of permanent bases in eastern and central
Europe- as well as the plans to despatch an expeditionary force to the
Ukraine all smack of war games designed to provoke a response.
Putin’s unopposed take over Ukrainian military establishments in the
Crimea prior to its referendum has been his only overtly aggressive
response. But he was clear that provocations from the West could be
tolerated only up to a point.
As he said in his speech after the re-integrating of Crimea into Russia:
If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.
And while he has reacted in a measured way, such a strategy cannot
endure if the United States continues to prod in more brazen ways of
which the bill introduced into Congress last May by Senator Bob Corker,
the Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA) bill s.2277, is suggestive
that the Obama administration could take.
RAPA would require the administration to “use all appropriate
elements of United States national power…to protect the independence,
sovereignty, and territorial and economic integrity of Ukraine and other
sovereign nations in Europe and Eurasia from Russian aggression”.
Included among its provisions is the direction that the United States
and NATO should substantially increase support for the “armed forces of
the Republics of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia” and also that
the complement of forward-based NATO forces in those states be
significantly raised.
The provisions also allow for de facto membership of NATO on the part
of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to which the transfer of equipment and
personnel could be made without the need for prior consultation on the
part of the United States with its NATO partners.
The RAPA bill goes on to propose a set of demands which if enacted
and followed as policy would put the United States and Russia on a
direct course for military conflict. RAPA demands that Russia “withdraw
from the eastern border of Ukraine” and that its forces “must be
withdrawn from Crimea within seven days” of the Act coming into legal
effect.
While music to the ears of the belligerent nationalist sentiments of
the Ukrainian regime typified by the inauguration comments of President
Petro Poroshenko that Ukraine would retake Crimea and defence minister
Lieutenant-General Valeriy Heletey’s promise that there will be “a
victory parade…in Ukraine’s Sevastopol”, RAPA’s provisions can only
horrify that strand of thinking bent toward a peaceful solution of the
crisis.
Any military action initiated by the Ukrainian military in seeking to
repossess Crimea, an affront to Russia’s unarticulated but long
subsisting ‘Black Sea Doctrine’, would naturally trigger an
uncompromising and resolute response.
At the same time, a Russian incursion aimed at protecting the
Russian-speaking territories which have been ceaselessly bombarded for
months by Ukrainian artillery and air power, if done under the
circumstance of an enacted RAPA with its provisions as they stand, would
technically trigger the invocation by the Ukrainian regime of the
collective defence principle which is enshrined in Article 5 of NATO’s
treaty.
Article 5 provides the following:
If a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other
member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed
attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary
to assist the Ally attacked.
A collision of US-NATO forces with their Russian opponents on the
battlefield would in the shortest time-span immediately put both sides
on a nuclear alert with the doctrine of a pre-emptive nuclear
first-strike now being a fundamental part of war operations.
Each side would be armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Bombers and
submarines capable of carrying nuclear devices would await decisive
orders from their relevant commanders, and, of course, intercontinental
ballistic missiles will be primed to destroy the other side’s military
installations and major population centres.
Even a limited use of such weaponry would risk global destruction.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction in 1835 that Russo-American rivalry would define the 20
th Century was accurate enough. But the revival of this rivalry in the 21
st Century
under the auspices of a coalescing of the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz
Doctrines; the former seeking aggressively to subdue Russia and the
latter; fanatical in its professing of American Exceptionalism and
staunchly amoral in the justification of the means by which it can
achieve domination, has brought a renewed danger of a nuclear
catastrophe.
It is a rivalry which in effect may determine the continued existence of humanity.
