Why We Could End Up at War with Russia

Noam Chomsky's latest book (more info here)

by Gaius Publius

Scheduling note: I'll be on travel for much of the next two weeks, so no posting until early July.

We've written in these pages about the history of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War (examples here and here). We've also written, with trepidation, about how a new, post-Obama "even more muscular" U.S. foreign policy could lead to, frankly, an actual shooting war with Russia (see here).

Now I'd like to point to this comprehensive analysis of post-Cold War U.S. relations with Russia and Eastern Europe via an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book, Who Runs the World? (These excerpts are only a portion of a much larger group of excerpts published by Tom Engelhardt in two installments at TomDispatch.com. First installment here, the article from which this excerpt was taken. Second installment here.)

Adam Smith on the "Masters of Mankind" and their "Vile Maxim" — “All for ourselves and nothing for other people”

We'll get to Russia in a moment. First, I'd like to share three introductory paragraphs that deal with the subject of the book's title. As Chomsky points out, states are rarely unitary, ruled from one head, and he makes a very important point about the modern capitalist state as including actors that Adam Smith called, derisively, the "masters of mankind." We would call them the Kochs, the Rubins, the big-money CEO class in general, and, on Wall Street, the "masters of the universe." The money class, in short, that directs our political class, as much or more so than they are directed.

Look for the phrase "masters of mankind" below. Adam Smitth's comment on them is surprisingly modern, surprisingly accurate. Chomsky:

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world.

In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.

“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” sums up the pathology of our real ruling class quite well. It's a recipe for disaster, of course, a recipe for a zero-growth world, but I doubt they're looking that far ahead.

It's also a recipe for war, as you'll see.

The View from Russia: What Happened When the USSR Collapsed

In the extended excerpt from which the above is taken, Chomsky looks at the challenges today in three regions of the world, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Islamic World. Here are his comments on Eastern Europe. Please note carefully the history of U.S.-Russian relations starting from the breakup of the Soviet Union.

If you remember nothing else from reading this, I hope the "view from Russia" remains firmly in your mind. It's not that I'm justifying their behavior. I'm helping you to understand it, so that you can anticipate what kind of response will come back from which kinds of what will look to them like provocation.

Chomsky again, from the middle of Engelhardt's first long excerpt (my emphasis):

The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe

Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.”

The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions.”

The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives. However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the 1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create a genuine ‘strategic partnership.’”

These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt,” Sakwa writes, regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and other initiatives).

The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.

Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official U.N. version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S. command.

Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.

Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S. establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”

“Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.” That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”

In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo -- as happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo.

As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far -- literally -- as questions of survival.

A great deal is indeed at stake. What will another Warrior President do to the world? Will that warrior drag us down further, as we've been dragged down already into the world of a U.S.-created ISIS (or Daesh, as they should be called)?

The View from Russia, in Maps

Again, "The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion." Here's the world as Russia sees it (not just Putin; all Russia). Here's what Europe used to look like. NATO nations are in blue:

Europe immediately before the collapse of the USSR. NATO nations in blue (source).

In contrast, here's what Russia sees today (NATO nations again in blue):

Europe after the collapse of the USSR. NATO nations in blue, NATO applicants in green (source).

German reunification (with a united Germany joining NATO) was agreed to by Gorbachev and the West, and occurred almost immediately, in 1990. By 1991, NATO was looking at expansion, starting with Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The march to Russia's borders hasn't stopped. If Ukraine and Georgia are admitted, the only non-NATO nation on Russia's European border will be Belarus, the former Soviet Republic of Byelorussia.

Imagine, as Chomsky writes, "how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well." Imagine how fast we would have killed that possibility dead — "terminated with extreme prejudice" in Chomsky's phrase.

I'll say this plainly. Russia is a nuclear state, and they've had about enough of U.S. triumphalism and expansion. The next "warrior president," flush with hubris and spoiling for a fight, could get us all killed.

(Note: Many think we're already waging war with Russia economically, a war the Russians haven't begun to respond to aggressively. Yet. Start here.)

GP
 

Clinton’s Speech Shows that Only Sanders is Fit for the Presidency

Since promising Gorbachev "no NATO expansion" the U.S. is pushing NATO to Russia's every European border. If you were the Russians, how would you feel? How would you feel if Russia had missiles in Mexico? Yet we're putting missiles in Poland. Want to put Clinton in charge of that volatile stew?

by Gaius Publius

Hillary Clinton recently gave what her campaign billed as a "foreign policy speech" (transcript here) but was really just a "foreign policy campaign event" — mainly an attack on Donald Trump. Almost all of the news that covered the event covered the anti-Trump effectiveness of it, including a rather fawning Rachel Maddow report.

But there was actual news from that speech, though you had to be looking at what Clinton said about herself, and not what she said about Trump, to find it. Here's Jeffrey Sachs on that speech. He starts with some background (my emphasis everywhere):

Clinton’s Speech Shows that Only Sanders is Fit for the Presidency

Hillary Clinton’s recent foreign policy speech was an attack on Donald Trump but was also a reminder that Clinton is a deeply flawed and worrisome candidate. Her record as Secretary of State was one of the worst in modern US history; her policies have enmeshed America in new Middle East wars, rising terrorism, and even a new Cold War with Russia. Of the three leading candidates, only Bernie Sanders has the sound judgment to avoid further war and to cooperate with the rest of the world.

Clinton is intoxicated with American power. She has favored one war of choice after the next: bombing Belgrade (1999); invading Iraq (2003); toppling Qaddafi (2011); funding Jihadists in Syria (2011 till now). The result has been one bloodbath after another, with open wounds until today fostering ISIS, terrorism, and mass refugee flows.

He then gets to the speech itself. Many have suspected that Clinton would be one of the most warlike modern presidents, on a par with George W. Bush. Sachs says that this speech confirms those suspicions:

In her speech, Clinton engaged in her own Trump-like grandiose fear mongering: “[I]f America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum - and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety - and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.”

This kind of arrogance - that America and America alone must run the world - has led straight to overstretch: perpetual wars that cannot be won, and unending and escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and others that make the world more dangerous. It doesn’t seem to dawn on Clinton that in today’s world, we need cooperation, not endless bravado.

Clinton professed her belief “with all my heart that America is an exceptional country - that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth.” Yet surely President Lincoln was speaking in moral terms, not in Clinton’s militaristic terms. Lincoln did not mean that the last best hope of earth should send NATO bombers into Libya, the CIA into Syria, and Special Ops forces into countless other countries. Surely Lincoln would have been more prudent than to push NATO expansion to Russia’s very doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia, thereby triggering a violent response from Russia and a new Cold War.

Sachs points to this part of Clinton's speech:

Clinton: Unlike [Trump], I have some experience with the tough calls and the hard work of statecraft. I wrestled with the Chinese over a climate deal in Copenhagen, brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia, twisted arms to bring the world together in global sanctions against Iran, and stood up for the rights of women, religious minorities and LGBT people around the world.

He then notes that this is a list of her failures. Back to Sachs:

Pure braggadocio. While Clinton “wrestled with China” over a climate deal, she failed to achieve one. While she “brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” she failed to head off the disastrous Gaza War in the first place. While she “negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia,” she championed a remarkably confrontational approach with Russia based on NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia and a new nuclear arms race that will cost American taxpayers more than $355 billion over a decade. While she claims to have “stood up for the rights of women [and] religious minorities,” her Syrian adventurism left Syria devastated, displaced 10 million people, and destroyed the religious minority communities she claimed to defend.

We'll come back to the main point in a minute, but let's pause at "wrestled with Chine over a climate deal." That was at the 2009 failed Copenhagen climate summit.

What Really Happened in Copenhagen in 2009

About Clinton and Obama's role at the Copenhagen climate conference, Sachs is far too kind. I I explained here, it's highly likely that Obama and Clinton actually sabotaged that conference. That's why the Chinese were so furious with him, publicly humiliated him...

“What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal … “

...and sent Obama and Clinton scurrying after them, chasing through the convention hall looking for the Chinese, after they learned that the Chinese had already left for the airport. Obama and Clinton needed some kind of confrontation with them that could be spun as a "meeting." From Clinton's remarks during the first debate (quoted here):

When we met in Copenhagen in 2009 and, literally, President Obama and I were hunting for the Chinese, going throughout this huge convention center, because we knew we had to get them to agree to something.

This is what "scurrying" looks like after a well deserved public humiliation. Now back to our original story.

Clinton Is As Dangerous As Trump

Sachs concludes:

Clinton rightly accused Trump of being unpredictable, yet Clinton is dangerously predictable. She is always trying to prove how tough she is, how tough America is, how exceptional is America’s power. Trump is unqualified to be President because he lacks both the necessary experience and good judgment. Clinton, by contrast, has the extensive experience that proves that she too lacks the good judgment to be President.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, not only offers a vastly better economic program than Clinton, but also a foreign policy based on wisdom, decency, and especially restraint. As a result, the American people trust Sanders rather than Clinton.

Thus his headline — on foreign policy "only Sanders is fit for the presidency," not Trump, not Clinton.

NATO, Russia and the Syrian Conflict — A Prelude to Disaster

I may give this more attention later, but just consider the possibilities of conflict with Russia under Clinton. She wants to be aggressive in Syria and topple Assad. There are multiple forces arrayed against him, and against each other, some backed by the Russians, some backed by other Mideast national actors — and some backed by the CIA while others are backed by the Pentagon. Imagine the mess.

Check out this incredible story from the Chicago Tribune:

CIA-armed militias are shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in Syria

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

"Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it," said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

We can't even keep our own selves straight. Now substitute "Russia" for "CIA" and "U.S." for "Pentagon" in the headline above. Add in a U.S.-enforced "no-fly zone" — which Clinton endorses —  and Turkish interests in Syria, which aren't often American interests, and the presence of Russian jets providing support for their surrogates on the ground. Spice the brew with energy conflicts, pipeline agreements to take oil and gas to the Mediterranean through Syria, and this whole thing could blow up in Ms. Clinton's hyper-aggressive face. And ours.

Finally, consider Russia's already angry point of view. When the Soviet Union fell, the deal with the U.S. was "No NATO Expansion." Here's what happened:

President George H.W. Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev that if the Soviets let the Warsaw Pact go, Russia would not have to worry about NATO expansion. The U.S. responded to this deal by immediately taking the former Warsaw Pact states into NATO and then moving into former Soviet territory in the Baltics. Nobody could blame new entrants for wanting NATO entry, given their past of Soviet occupation. But, neither could anyone blame Russians for feeling betrayed by the U.S. breaking its word.

Gorbachev was furious (fuller discussion here). NATO is now aggressively expanding right to Russia's border (see map above), with the U.S. backed coup regime in Ukraine applying for membership. The U.S. is also building new missile facilities in Poland:

NATO Ratchets Up Missile Defense Despite Russian Criticism

LONDON — NATO’s European missile defense system will go live on Thursday when a base in Romania becomes operational. The next day, Poland is scheduled to break ground on its NATO missile-defense base.

The decision by the United States and its allies in Eastern Europe to proceed with ballistic missile defense in the face of increasingly loud Russian criticism is an important stage in the alliance’s new stance toward Moscow.

Those deployments will be coupled this spring with major military exercises in Poland and the Baltics, with significant American participation, and a beefed-up rapid reaction force of up to 5,000 troops....

We've already seen Ms. Clinton's fierce battle style on the campaign trail. She's a take-no-prisoners person. Do we really want Clinton to stir the international pot in the same way she stirred the Libyan pot?

Echoing Sachs, the future of the world could depend on whether we get Bernie Sanders into the White House, because neither of the other two choices are fit for the role of Commander in Chief. Quoting Sachs, "Clinton is intoxicated with American power."

We don't give our car keys to the intoxicated. What applies to Trump in Clinton's speech applies to Clinton herself. Either one of them, in my view, could get us all killed.

Put differently, Clinton now runs the Democratic Party, and you see how heavy-handed she is. Do you want to give her the whole federal government, and its military, with no one looking over her shoulder, no one to report to? The price for that mistake could be very great indeed. Russia and the U.S., both, are still nuclear nations.

GP
 

Gorbachev: The New Cold War With Russia Could Turn "Hot"

by Gaius Publius

It's not on most people's radar, I think, that what's going on inside Ukraine is a proxy war between the West — mainly the U.S., aided by the E.U. — and Russia. In the same way, the long "internal" Nicaraguan conflict of the Reagan '80s was a proxy war between, yet again, the U.S. and Russia (also, between the U.S. and anyone in Latin America who didn't want to live under U.S. continental domination):

The [Nicaraguan] Revolution marked a significant period in Nicaraguan history and revealed the country as one of the major proxy war battlegrounds of the Cold War with the events in the country rising to international attention.

Although the initial overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1978–79 was a bloody affair, the Contra War of the 1980s took the lives of tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and was the subject of fierce international debate. During the 1980s both the FSLN (a leftist collection of political parties) and the Contras (a rightist collection of counter-revolutionary groups) received large amounts of aid from the Cold War super-powers (respectively, the Soviet Union and the United States).

The so-called Ukrainian uprising is similar, with forces on both sides (not just one) aided and abetted by more powerful nations using others to do their bidding. In fact, the whole recent history of Ukrainian unrest has in it the heavy hand of the West (click; it's a good read).

In that context, I offer the following, Mikhail Gorbachev quoted from an interview he gave to RT.com:

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the US of dragging Russia into a new Cold War. The former Soviet president fears the chill in relations could eventually spur an armed conflict.

“Plainly speaking, the US has already dragged us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its idea of triumphalism,” Gorbachev said in an interview with Interfax.

The former USSR leader, whose name is associated with the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, is worried about the possible consequences.

“What’s next? Unfortunately, I cannot be sure that the Cold War will not bring about a ‘hot’ one. I’m afraid they might take the risk,” he said.

Gorbachev’s criticism of Washington comes as the West is pondering new sanctions against Russia, blaming it for the ongoing military conflict in eastern Ukraine, and alleging Moscow is sending troops to the restive areas. Russia has denied the allegations.

“All we hear from the US and the EU now is sanctions against Russia,” Gorbachev said. “Are they completely out of their minds? The US has been totally ‘lost in the jungle’ and is dragging us there as well.” 

There's more; read here to get the full report. There's no question we're in a new cold war with Russia. I've written about the background of betrayal and encirclement that characterizes U.S. relations with Russia since Bush I and Gorbachev negotiated the new path forward in the era of Russian glasnost ("public candor") and perestroika ("restructuring"). Proxies in the new war include our "allies" (clients) in Ukraine; NATO and its march to the borders of Russia; and the price of oil.

You should know that Russia is taking this very seriously. This is not about "that devil Putin," as we in the comfortable TV-watching West are led to see it. For all Russians, this is about what Gorbachev says it's about — "Plainly speaking, the US has already dragged us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its idea of triumphalism."

Consider just NATO. Imagine Mexico as a Warsaw Pact ally after a "restructuring" in Washington. You don't have to agree to understand that for Russians the encroachment has gone too far. To quote a line Alan Grayson used in another context, "This could end in tears." Mikhail Gorbachev agrees, and he's not the devil, right?

GP

Cross-posted with permission from Digby's Hullabaloo.

#