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