The Peninsula Foundation

Author: Jeffrey Sachs

The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism

For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.

In 1992, U.S. foreign policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 convinced a group of committed ideologues—who came to be known as neoconservatives—that the U.S. should now rule the world as the unchallenged sole superpower.

Despite countless foreign policy disasters at neocon hands, the 2024 NATO Declaration continues to push the neocon agenda, driving the world closer to nuclear war.
The neoconservatives were originally led by Richard Cheney, the Defense Secretary in 1992. Every President since then—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading theU.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia and, therefore, brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed.
The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelt out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO’s eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President.
To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarization of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare.
The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.
The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation into two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi.
The U.S. quest for hegemony, which was arrogant and unwise in 1992, is absolutely delusional today since the U.S. clearly faces formidable rivals that can compete with the U.S. on the battlefield, in nuclear arms deployments and in the production and deployment of advanced technologies. China’s GDP is now around 30% larger than the U.S. when measured at international prices, and China is the world’s low-cost producer and supplier of many critical green technologies, including EVs, 5G, photovoltaics, wind power, modular nuclear power, and others. China’s productivity is now so great that the U.S. complains of China’s “over-capacity.”

Sadly and alarmingly, the NATO declaration repeats the neoconservative delusions.
The Declaration falsely declares that “Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine,” despite the U.S. provocations that led to the outbreak of the war in 2014.
The NATO Declaration reaffirms Article 10 of the NATO Washington Treaty, according to which NATO’s eastward expansion is none of Russia’s business. Yet the U.S. would never accept Russia or China establishing a military base on the US border (say in Mexico), as the U.S. first declared in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and has reaffirmed ever since.
The NATO Declaration reaffirms NATO’s commitment to biodefense technologies, despite growing evidence that U.S. biodefense spending by NIH financed the laboratory creation of the virus that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
The NATO Declaration proclaims NATO’s intention to continue to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis missiles (as it has already done in Poland, Romania, and Turkey) despite the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania has profoundly destabilized the nuclear arms control architecture.
The NATO Declaration expresses no interest whatsoever in a negotiated peace for Ukraine.
The NATO Declaration doubles down on Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” Yet Russia will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership, so the “irreversible” commitment is an irreversible commitment to war.
The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Biden had serious qualms about pledging an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet Biden’s advisors brushed aside these concerns.

The neoconservatives have created countless disasters for the U.S. and the world, including several failed wars, a massive buildup of U.S. public debt driven by trillions of dollars of wasteful war-driven military outlays, and the increasingly dangerous confrontation of the U.S. with China, Russia, Iran, and others. The neocons have brought the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight (nuclear war), compared with 17 minutes in 1992.

For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.
Alas, NATO has just done the opposite.

Feature Image Credit: Bloomberg

July 24, 2024
The Perils and Promise of the Emerging Multipolar World

The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialisation are now making up for lost time.

We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world.

The World Bank’s release on May 30 of its latest estimates of national output (up to the year 2022) offers an occasion to reflect on the new geopolitics. The new data underscore the shift from a U.S.-led world economy to a multipolar world economy, a reality that U.S. strategists have so far failed to recognize, accept, or admit.

The World Bank figures make clear that the economic dominance of the West is over. In 1994, the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) constituted 45.3% of world output, compared with 18.9% of world output in the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates). The tables have turned. The BRICS now produce 35.2% of world output, while the G7 countries produce 29.3%.

As of 2022, the largest five economies in descending order are China, the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan. China’s GDP is around 25% larger than the U.S.’ (roughly 30% of the U.S. GDP per person but with 4.2 times the population). Three of the top five countries are in the BRICS, while two are in the G7. In 1994, the largest five were the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, and India, with three in the G7 and two in the BRICS.

The core U.S.-led alliance, which includes the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, was 56% of world output in 1994, but now is only 39.5%. As a result, the U.S. global influence is waning.

As the shares of world output change, so too does global power. The core U.S.-led alliance, which includes the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, was 56% of world output in 1994, but now is only 39.5%. As a result, the U.S. global influence is waning. As a recent vivid example, when the U.S.-led group introduced economic sanctions on Russia in 2022, very few countries outside the core alliance joined. As a result, Russia had little trouble shifting its trade to countries outside the U.S.-led alliance.

The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are now making up for lost time. Economic convergence actually began in the 1950s as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia came to an end. It has proceeded in waves, starting first in East Asia, then roughly 20 years later India, and for the coming 20-40 years in Africa.

These and some other regions are growing much faster than the Western economies since they have more “headroom” to boost GDP by rapidly raising education levels, boosting workers’ skills, and installing modern infrastructure, including universal access to electrification and digital platforms. The emerging economies are often able to leapfrog the richer countries with state-of-the-art infrastructure (e.g., fast intercity rail, 5G, modern airports and seaports) while the richer countries remain stuck with aging infrastructure and expensive retrofits. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook projects that the emerging and developing economies will average growth of around 4% per year in the coming five years, while the high-income countries will average less than 2% per year.

It’s not only in skills and infrastructure that convergence is occurring. Many of the emerging economies, including China, Russia, Iran, and others, are advancing rapidly in technological innovations as well, in both civilian and military technologies.

China’s capacity for innovation and low-cost production is underpinned by enormous R&D spending and its vast and growing labor force of scientists and engineers.

China clearly has a large lead in the manufacturing of cutting-edge technologies needed for the global energy transition, including batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, photovoltaics, wind turbines, fourth generation nuclear power, and others. China’s rapid advances in space technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other technologies is similarly impressive. In response, the U.S. has made the absurd claim that China has an “overcapacity” in these cutting-edge technologies, while the obvious truth is that the U.S. has a significant under-capacity in many sectors. China’s capacity for innovation and low-cost production is underpinned by enormous R&D spending and its vast and growing labor force of scientists and engineers.

Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Europe by surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO forces, yet Russia has resisted this militarily in both Georgia and Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Asia by surrounding China in the South China Sea, a folly that can lead the U.S. into a disastrous war over Taiwan. The U.S. is also losing its standing in the Middle East by resisting the united call of the Arab world for recognition of Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state.

Yet primacy is certainly not possible today, and was hubristic even 30 years ago when U.S. relative power was much greater. Today, the U.S. share of world output stands at 14.8%, compared with 18.5% for China, and the U.S. share of world population is a mere 4.1%, compared with 17.8% for China.
The trend toward broad global economic convergence means that U.S. hegemony will not be replaced by Chinese hegemony. Indeed, China’s share of world output is likely to peak at around 20% during the coming decade and thereafter to decline as China’s population declines. Other parts of the world, notably including India and Africa, are likely to show a large rise in their respective shares of global output, and with that, in their geopolitical weight as well.

We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world. It too is fraught with challenges. It could usher in a new “tragedy of great power politics,” in which several nuclear powers compete—in vain—for hegemony. It could lead to a breakdown of fragile global rules, such as open trade under the World Trade Organization. Or, it could lead to a world in which the great powers exercise mutual tolerance, restraint, and even cooperation, in accord with the U.N. Charter, because they recognize that only such statecraft will keep the world safe in the nuclear age.

This article was published earlier in commondreams

Feature Image Credit: The World Financial Review

June 19, 2024
The US economic war on China

The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival.

China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown is the result of US measures that aim to slow China’s growth. Such US policies violate World Trade Organization rules and are a danger to global prosperity. They should be stopped.
The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival. The first and most obvious application of this playbook was the technology blockade that the US imposed on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was America’s declared enemy and US policy aimed to block Soviet access to advanced technologies.

At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. This may seem surprising, as Japan was and is a US ally. Yet Japan was becoming “too successful,” as Japanese firms outcompeted US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles.

The second application of the playbook is less obvious, and in fact, is generally overlooked even by knowledgeable observers. At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. This may seem surprising, as Japan was and is a US ally. Yet Japan was becoming “too successful,” as Japanese firms outcompeted US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles. Japan’s success was widely hailed in bestsellers such as Japan as Number One by my late, great colleague, Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, US politicians limited US markets to Japan’s exports (via so-called “voluntary” limits agreed with Japan) and pushed Japan to overvalue its currency. The Japanese Yen appreciated from around 240 Yen per dollar in 1985 to 128 Yen per dollar in 1988 and 94 Yen to the dollar in 1995, pricing Japanese goods out of the US market. Japan went into a slump as export growth collapsed. Between 1980 and 1985, Japan’s exports rose annually by 7.9 percent; between 1985 and 1990, export growth fell to 3.5 percent annually; and between 1990 and 1995, to 3.3 percent annually. As growth slowed markedly, many Japanese companies fell into financial distress, leading to a financial bust in the early 1990s.

In the mid-1990s, I asked one of Japan’s most powerful government officials why Japan didn’t devalue the currency to re-establish growth. His answer was that the US wouldn’t allow it.

Now the US is taking aim at China. Starting around 2015, US policymakers came to view China as a threat rather than a trade partner. This change of view was due to China’s economic success. China’s economic rise really began to alarm US strategists when China announced in 2015 a “Made in China 2025” policy to promote China’s advancement to the cutting edge of robotics, information technology, renewable energy, and other advanced technologies. Around the same time, China announced its Belt and Road Initiative to help build modern infrastructure throughout Asia, Africa and other regions, largely using Chinese finance, companies, and technologies.

After winning the 2016 election on an anti-China platform, Trump imposed unilateral tariffs on China that clearly violated WTO rules. To ensure that WTO would not rule against the US measures, the US disabled the WTO appellate court by blocking new appointments.

The US dusted off the old playbook to slow China’s surging growth. President Barrack Obama first proposed to create a new trading group with Asian countries that would exclude China, but presidential candidate Donald Trump went further, promising outright protectionism against China. After winning the 2016 election on an anti-China platform, Trump imposed unilateral tariffs on China that clearly violated WTO rules. To ensure that WTO would not rule against the US measures, the US disabled the WTO appellate court by blocking new appointments. The Trump Administration also blocked products from leading Chinese technology companies such as ZTE and Huawei and urged US allies to do the same.

When President Joe Biden came to office, many (including me) expected Biden to reverse or ease Trump’s anti-China policies. The opposite happened. Biden doubled down, not only maintaining Trump’s tariffs on China but also signing new executive orders to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies and US investments. American firms were advised informally to shift their supply chains from China to other countries, a process labelled “friend-shoring” as opposed to offshoring. In carrying out these measures, the US completely ignored WTO principles and procedures.

The US strongly denies that it is in an economic war with China, but as the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The US is using a familiar playbook, and the Washington politicians are invoking martial rhetoric, calling China an enemy that must be contained or defeated.

The results are seen in a reversal of China’s exports to the US. In the month that Trump came into office, January 2017, China accounted for 22 per cent of US merchandise imports. By the time Biden came into office in January 2021, China’s share of US imports had dropped to 19 per cent. As of June 2023, China’s share of US imports had plummeted to 13 per cent. Between June 2022 and June 2023, US imports from China fell by a whopping 29 per cent.

Of course, the dynamics of China’s economy are complex and hardly driven by China-US trade alone. Perhaps China’s exports to the US will partly rebound. Yet Biden seems unlikely to ease trade barriers with China in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Unlike Japan in the 1990s, which was dependent on the US for its security, and so followed US demands, China has more room for maneuver in the face of US protectionism. Most importantly, I believe, China can substantially increase its exports to the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, through policies such as expanding the Belt and Road Initiative. My assessment is that the US attempt to contain China is not only wrongheaded in principle but destined to fail in practice. China will find partners throughout the world economy to support a continued expansion of trade and technological advances.

Feature Image Credit: The limits of US-China Economic Rivalry www.setav.org

September 4, 2023
An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

Former President Trump sidelined NATO to such an extent that European members were disillusioned with American leadership and NATO was in a state of fragmentation. With Biden’s presidency unleashing its Ukraine strategy and war against Russia, NATO has solidified with blind subservience to American leadership. Building on imagined threats from Russia and China, the US is now seeking to make a NATO alliance format for security across Asia as well. On the eve of the 33rd summit at Vilnius on 11-12 July 2023, Türkiye dropped its objections for Sweden to become the 33rd member of NATO, abandoning its 150-year tradition of proud neutrality and peace in favour of war-mongering. With an eye on Asia, the summit invited four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – as observers at the summit. The summit statement is, as expected, replete with anti-Russian rhetoric but more importantly extensive in its focus on the ‘China threat’ thus paving the way for NATO’s role in Asia. Jeffrey Sachs, in a speech in Australia in early July (reproduced below), has warned forcefully about the peril that NATO poses to global peace and security. – TPF Editorial Team

“My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable. I’m not sure who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president.”, says Jeffrey Sachs in a speech at a Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) seminar, Melbourne, Australia. “U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine.”

“the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.”

Jeffrey Sachs
Speech to Shape (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth)
July 5, 2023

Good afternoon to everybody. I want to thank you for inviting me and to thank SHAPE for its leadership. I just had the privilege to listen to Alison Broinowski and Chung-in Moon. We have been treated to brilliant and insightful statements. I absolutely agree with all that has been said. The world has gone mad but especially the Anglo-Saxon world, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether there is any sense in our little English-speaking corner of the world. I’m of course speaking of the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British Imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable now compared even to 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read anymore. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100 per cent repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.

it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

And they are cheer-led by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States for U.S. hegemony and for war. Whatever the U.S. says, Britain will say it ten times more enthusiastically. The U.K. leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It is the great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.

Now, how Australia and New Zealand fall for this idiocy is really a deep question for me and for you. People should know better. But I’m afraid that it is the Five Eyes and the security establishment that told the politicians, to the extent that the politicians are involved in this, ‘well this is how we have to do it’. This is our Security State and I don’t think our politicians necessarily have much role in this. By the way, the public has no role in U.S. foreign policy at all. We have no debate, no discussion, no deliberation, no debates over voting the hundred, now $113 billion, but in fact much more money spent on the Ukraine War.

So far there’s not been an hour of organised debate even in the Congress on this, much less in the public, but my guess is that your security establishment is really the driver of this in Australia, and they explain to the Prime Minister and others: ‘you know this is the utmost National Security, and this is what America has told us. Let us, your security apparatus, explain what we’re seeing. Of course, you cannot divulge this to the broader public, but this is, at the essence, a struggle for survival in the world’.

Everything I see myself, and I’m now 43 years in this activity as an economic advisor all over the world, suggests that this message is nonsense. One thing that would be interesting for people to look at, in order to understand these developments, is a very telling article by a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Ambassador Robert Blackwell and Ashley Tellis, written for the Council on Foreign Relations in March 2015. I want to read a couple excerpts from it because it laid out the plan of what’s happening right now pretty directly. This is how things work in the U.S., in which future plans are laid out to the establishment in such reports.

“Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally. Preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

– Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a March 2015 article for Council on Foreign Relations.

We’re basically told in 2015 what’s going to happen in US-China relations. The deterioration of relations was planned — it’s not ad hoc. So, here’s what Blackwell and Tellis wrote in 2015. First, “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally.” And then they argue that “preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

So, what’s the U.S. goal? The goal is very straightforward, it is the primacy of the United States globally. Blackwell and Tellis lay out the game plan for China. They tell us what to do.

Here’s the list, though I’m only excerpting: “Creating new preferential trading arrangements among U.S. friends and allies to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China.” This is the game that Obama already started with TPP, though he couldn’t get it through domestic political opposition. Second, “create, in partnership with U.S. allies, a technology control regime vis-à-vis Beijing,” to block China’s strategic capabilities. Third, build up “power-political capacities of U.S. friends and allies on China’s periphery,” and “improving the capability of U.S. military forces to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition.”

This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history.

What I find especially remarkable about this list is that it was made in 2015. It’s the step-by-step plan of action actually being carried out. This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history. In 1997 in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out with precision the intended timeline for NATO enlargement and specifically the intention to include Ukraine in that NATO enlargement. Of course, that NATO enlargement plan has led us directly to the Ukraine War, which is indeed a proxy Russia-US war over NATO enlargement.

Now the friends and geniuses that brought you the Ukraine War are on their way to bringing you a new war in your neighbourhood. As Professor Moon noted, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is starting to open its offices in East Asia, which is not exactly the North Atlantic.

So, this is where we are. It’s not absolutely simple to see through for one main reason, at least in the U.S. I’m not sure what it’s like in Australia but I expect that it’s pretty much the same as in the U.S., where we have no honesty or public deliberation about any of this. The policies are owned entirely by the security establishment, the military-industrial complex, the network of “think tanks” which are in fact non-think tanks in Washington, with almost all funded by the military-industrial complex.

The military-industrial complex and its corporate lobby have taken over the East Coast universities where I teach. I taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, and now I teach at Columbia University. The influence of the intelligence agencies on the campuses is unprecedented, in my experience. All of this has happened without much public notice, almost a silent coup. There is no debate, no public politics, no honesty, no documents revealed. Everything is secret, confidential and a bit mysterious. Since I happen to be an economist who engages with the heads of state and ministers around the world, I hear a lot of things and see a lot of things that help me to pierce through the official “narratives” and pervasive lies.

You will not find any of this in our public discourse. And just a word, if I may, about the Ukraine War. The war was completely predictable, and resulted from a U.S. plan for hegemony based on NATO enlargement that dates back to the early 1990’s. The U.S. strategy was to bring Ukraine into the U.S. military orbit. Brzezinski, again in 1997 in his book The Global Chess Board, laid out the strategy. Russia without Ukraine is nothing, he argued. Ukraine, he wrote, is the geographical pivot for Eurasia. Interestingly, Brzezinski warned American policymakers to ensure that they don’t push Russia and China into an alliance. In fact, that would be so antithetical to U.S. interests that Brzezinski clearly believed that it would never happen. But it has, because U.S. foreign policy is incompetent as well as profoundly dangerous and misconceived.

During 1990-91, I happen to have been an advisor to Gorbachev, and during 1991-94, to Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, spanning the late days of perestroika and the early days of Russian and Ukrainian independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I watched very closely what was happening. I saw that the United States was absolutely uninterested in any way in helping Russia to stabilise.

The idea of the U.S. security establishment from the early 1990s was U.S.-led unipolarity or U.S. hegemony. In the early 1990s, the U.S. rejected measures to help stabilise the Soviet economy and then the Russian economy, while it also began planning NATO enlargement, in direct contradiction to what the U.S. and Germany had promised Gorbachev and Yeltsin. So, the issue of NATO enlargement, including to Ukraine, is part of a U.S. game plan that started in the early 1990s, and eventually led to the Ukraine war.

By the way, the U.S. was deeply involved in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014. Yes, this was a coup, and to an important extent, a regime change operation of the United States. I happen to have seen a part of it, and I know that U.S. money poured into supporting the Maidan. Such U.S. meddling was disgusting and destabilising, and all part of the game plan to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.

When one looks at the map it’s indeed Brzezinski’s 1997 idea: surround Russia in the Black Sea region. Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia would all be members of NATO. That would be the end of Russian power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. So it went for these “security” geniuses.

Putin put forward diplomatic responses that were repeatedly rejected by the U.S. and its NATO allies, including the Minsk II Agreement endorsed by the U.N Security Council, but then ignored by Ukraine.

On December 17, 2021, Putin put on the table a perfectly reasonable document as the basis for negotiation, A Draft U.S.-Russia Security Agreement. At the core was Russia’s call for an end to NATO expansion. Tragically, the U.S. blew it off. I called the White House at the end of December 2021, spoke with one of our top security officials, and pleaded, “Negotiate. Stop the NATO enlargement. You have a chance to avoid war.” Of course, to no avail. The United States’ formal response to Putin was that NATO enlargement was non-negotiable with Russia, a matter in which Russia has absolutely no say.

This is a mind-boggling way to pursue foreign affairs because it is a direct road to war. I hope everybody understands this war in Ukraine was close to ending as early as March 2022 with a negotiated agreement just one month after Russia invaded on February 24th. The negotiated agreement was stopped by the U.S. because it was based on Ukraine’s neutrality. The U.S. told Ukraine to fight on, end negotiations, and reject neutrality.

And so we are in a war that continues to escalate towards possible nuclear war, which is what would happen if Russia were to suffer deep defeats on the battlefield. Russia is not losing on the battlefield just now, but if it did, it would likely escalate to nuclear war. Russia is not going to be pushed out of the Donbas and Crimea and meekly go home with apologies. Russia is going to escalate if it needs to escalate. So, we are right now in a spiral that is extremely dangerous.

Japan plays utterly into this spiral. And Australia does as well. It’s so sad to watch Australia accepting to be used in this reckless way. To pay a fortune for new military bases in a reckless, provocative, and costly way, that will feed the U.S. military-industrial complex while weighing heavily on Australia.

Such U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine. Only an Asia-Pacific war would be even more disastrous. The whole idea of the U.S. and its allies fighting China is mind-boggling in its implications, its stupidity and its recklessness. All of this is utterly divorced from Australia’s real security interests. China is not a threat to Australia. It is not a threat to the world.

I don’t know of a single Chinese overseas invasion in its history, by the way, except when the Mongols briefly ruled China and tried to invade Japan. Other than the Mongol invasion, defeated by a typhoon, China has not launched overseas wars. It’s just not part of China’s statecraft, nor would such wars be in China’s national interest.

What worries me about the world is a deeply neurotic United States (in)security leadership that aims to be number one, but that can’t be number one in the way that it believes. This is pathetic, yet is applauded each day in London, a place that still dreams of the glory of global empire from a long bygone era.

RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

Permit me, in conclusion, to take one minute to say what should be done.

First, the war in Ukraine could end the day Biden steps up and says NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. The basis for a negotiated security arrangement has been there for 30 years, but has been rejected so far by the U.S.

Second, the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.

Third, the U.S. approach to arming Taiwan is profoundly dangerous, provocative and deliberately so.

Fourth, what is needed most in the Asia-Pacific is regional dialogue amongst Asia-Pacific nations.

Fifth, the Asia-Pacific should build on RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement]. RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

Sorry to have run on so long but it’s so important what SHAPE is doing. You’re completely on the right track and all best wishes to your efforts.

This transcript of Jeffrey Sach’s speech was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

Feature Image Credit: bnn.network

Cartoon Credit: Global Times

July 16, 2023
The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. TheNew York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a c able to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

This article was published earlier in commondreams.org and is republished under Creative Commons(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Feature Image Credit: columbian.com

May 24, 2023
What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding Nato and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $ 2 trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralysing the banking system.

The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand Nato to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for Nato countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for vice president Biden in 2014.

The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The second is that Nato enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into Nato.

The US repeatedly asserts that Nato is a defensive alliance. Yet Nato bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. Nato forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept Nato in Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of Nato; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.

The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over Nato enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

Since then, the war has escalated. According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-Nato country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.

Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
Feature Image Credit: politico.eu

This article was published earlier in dailymaverick.co.za and is republished with the permission of the author.

February 20, 2023
The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control

Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power. Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown. It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.

The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War. This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

Since the middle of the 19th Century, the West has competed with Russia over Crimea and more specifically, naval power in the Black Sea. In the Crimean War (1853-6), Britain and France captured Sevastopol and temporarily banished Russia’s navy from the Black Sea. The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War. This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

The US has long regarded any encroachment by great powers in the Western Hemisphere as a direct threat to US security, dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which states: “We owe it, therefore, to candour and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

In 1961, the US invaded Cuba when Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro looked to the Soviet Union for support. The US was not much interested in Cuba’s “right” to align with whichever country it wanted – the claim the US asserts regarding Ukraine’s supposed right to join NATO. The failed US invasion in 1961 led to the Soviet Union’s decision to place offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, which in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years ago this month. That crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Yet America’s regard for its own security interests in the Americas has not stopped it from encroaching on Russia’s core security interests in Russia’s neighbourhood. As the Soviet Union weakened, US policy leaders came to believe that the US military could operate as it pleases. In 1991, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to General Wesley Clark that the US can deploy its military force in the Middle East “and the Soviet Union won’t stop us.” America’s national security officials decided to overthrow Middle East regimes allied to the Soviet Union and encroach on Russia’s security interests.

In 1990, Germany and the US gave assurances to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could disband its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, without fear that NATO would enlarge eastward to replace the Soviet Union. It won Gorbachev’s assent to German reunification in 1990 on this basis. Yet with the Soviet Union’s demise, President Bill Clinton reneged by supporting the eastward expansion of NATO.

America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”

Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested vociferously but could do nothing to stop it. America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”

Under Clinton’s watch, NATO expanded to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. Five years later, under President George W. Bush, Jr. NATO expanded to seven more countries: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania), the Balkans (Slovenia), and Slovakia. Under President Barack Obama, NATO expanded to Albania and Croatia in 2009, and under President Donald Trump, to Montenegro in 2019.

Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement intensified sharply in 1999 when NATO countries disregarded the UN, attacked Russia’s ally Serbia, and stiffened further in the 2000s with the US wars of choice in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, President Putin declared that NATO enlargement 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 [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” – Putin at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

Putin continued: “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience of what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee. Where are these guarantees?”

In 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East). Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Also in 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East). Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East. With Ukraine’s and Georgia’s entry, Russia would be surrounded by five NATO countries in the Black Sea: Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Russia was initially protected from NATO enlargement to Ukraine by Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who led the Ukrainian parliament to declare Ukraine’s neutrality in 2010. Yet in 2014, the US helped to overthrow Yanukovych and bring to power a staunchly anti-Russian government. The Ukraine War broke out at that point, with Russia quickly reclaiming Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, the region of Eastern Ukraine with a relatively high proportion of Russian population. Ukraine’s parliament formally abandoned neutrality later in 2014.

Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas have been fighting a brutal war for 8 years. Attempts to end the war in the Donbas through the Minsk Agreements failed when Ukraine’s leaders decided not to honour the agreements, which called for autonomy for the Donbas. After 2014, the US poured in massive armaments to Ukraine and helped to restructure Ukraine’s military to be interoperable with NATO, as evidenced in this year’s fighting.

The Russian invasion in 2022 would likely have been averted had Biden agreed with Putin’s demand at the end of 2021 to end NATO’s eastward enlargement. The war would likely have been ended in March 2022, when the governments of Ukraine and Russia exchanged a draft peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Behind the scenes, the US and UK pushed Zelensky to reject any agreement with Putin and to fight on. At that point, Ukraine walked away from the negotiations.

The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake.

Russia will escalate as necessary, possibly to nuclear weapons, to avoid military defeat and NATO’s further eastward enlargement. The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake. Terrifyingly, the US was also prepared to use nuclear weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a senior Ukrainian official recently urged the US to launch nuclear strikes “as soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out nuclear strikes,” surely a recipe for World War III. We are again on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

President John F. Kennedy learned about nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis. He defused that crisis not by force of will or US military might, but by diplomacy and compromise, removing US nuclear missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing its nuclear missiles in Cuba. The following year, he pursued peace with the Soviet Union, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In June 1963, Kennedy uttered the essential truth that can keep us alive today: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO. Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of control, as the world has done on so many past occasions – yet this time with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.

This article is republished with the permission of the author. It was published earlier in www.other-news.info

Image Credit: Scroll.in

October 1, 2022
The West’s False Narrative about Russia and China

The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous.

The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticized Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticized China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and the Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 per cent of the world compared with 41 per cent in the BRICS.

At the core of all of this is the US’s attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 per cent of the world compared with 41 per cent in the BRICS.

There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations

Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

Feature Image Credit: Big Stock

This article was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

September 8, 2022