The War
The War, to the Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, references their country’s struggle for independence and freedom from their imperial conquerors and would-be saviors - first the French and then the United States, in which upwards of five million of its citizens died. To the British, and to many Americans, the most definitive recent armed conflict remains the Second World War, when democracy was threatened by the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan - their leaders, Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito, each considered evil incarnate. Those fortunate not to have experienced a war in their homeland in the last 77 years no doubt continue to rank WWII as The War. Yet the United States has caused unparalleled death and destruction across the globe in that time and the recipients of its hellfire, like the Vietnamese, will have translated that experience into some kind of ranking of its importance in both their personal and national histories. Indeed, given the universality of war, all peoples likely have a sense of just which war has been definitive in their and their country’s recent history.
For the first time in my life as a post - WWII British child, and now as an American citizen, I am amending my personal ranking of global conflicts. The war in Ukraine has galvanized Europe and the United States into a paroxysm of blood lust – directed at the Russian Federation and its president, Vladimir Putin. This may be The War, it seems to me, that will prove to be the pivotal cultural, geo-political and military conflict of our times.
It marks, I believe, an epochal global socio-political and economic fracturing initiated by the demonization of Russia by the West. The poisoning of the relationship between the alliance of The United States and Europe (manifested militarily as USNATO) and Moscow was not inevitable. There was an opportunity, after the collapse of the USSR, for Europe and America to offer meaningful help to offset the unraveling of Russia’s communist social safety net that had, since the death of Stalin, assured its population of a minimum of food, healthcare, and education. In an act that would have recalled the Marshall Plan implemented after the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII, bonds of friendship and cooperation might have been forged between the Russian Federation and Europe that ensured Russia’s allegiance to the West. Instead, the U.S. and the World Bank introduced a vicious kind of neoliberal vulture capitalism that fed upon the ruins of the country’s rich mineral and industrial infrastructure leaving only a population with a plummeting life-expectancy, an ever-increasing dependence on alcohol and the creation of an uber-rich flock of global raptors - who picked the country clean within a decade while their extreme wealth and influence peddling have since destabilized democracies and real estate prices around the world. Understandably aggrieved, Putin, in power since 2000, has consistently sought other global alliances, culminating in his recent agreement with the Chinese.
Just as the Cold War was fostered to provide a continuing role for the Military Industrial Complex after the end of WWII, Russia somehow had to be resuscitated after the collapse of the USSR as a continuing military threat, otherwise wither NATO, and wither the egregious military spending of the United States? Maintaining Russia as a viable threat also assured the U.S. of a continuation of its exports to Europe, in sales of its egregiously expensive and dubiously effective hi-tech armaments. For the record, Russia produces cheaper, more dependable, battle-tested equipment, as is now evidenced in their Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Putin declines to call it a war because it is a war that the American Empire deeply desires - a proxy war with Russia that is blatant in its attempt to turn Ukraine into killing fields for the destruction of young Russian soldiers, never mind the collateral death and displacement of that country’s civilians. Biden sees an opportunity to reprise the tactics that supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and turn the black soil of Ukraine into a meat grinder, the better to effect regime change in Russia. The comedian Zelensky plays along at the tragic expense of his countrymen.
There has long been a sustained effort to create a forward emplacement of advanced offensive weaponry on Russia’s south-western border by the USNATO consortium, which is effectively the military arm of Western civilization. The U.S. prepared the ground by spending many billions of dollars to turn the hearts and minds of Ukraine’s civil society against its traditional homeland of Russia and towards the West. And, in 2004 and 2014, it sponsored color revolutions that assured Ukraine’s political leadership was aligned with Europe (and NATO) rather than its eastern neighbor. Washington has faithfully followed the playbook established by Zbigniew Brzeznski in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he suggests that “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Ukraine is central to Russia’s conception of itself as a Slavic homeland, integral to its Federation of Republics Territories and Regions. Ukraine, true to the literal meaning of its name, has long been a traditional border land vital to Russia’s security. Without it, Russia loses its historical identity as an Empire and it is thus that Ukraine is essential to the American Empire: because it is a prime choke point for Putin’s dreams of his homeland’s cultural and geographic integrity.
And yet it is now clear that resource rich Russia bodes to become a key player in a new global hegemon that will entirely eclipse the American Empire. The economic union of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and potentially Turkey, (tied together along China’s Belt and Road Initiative) and with the support of most of the rest of Asia, Africa and South and Central America will reduce USNATO to the military arm of a West Asian Bantustan impotently allied with a politically riven, ungovernable United States. Russia’s control of its vast energy reserves gives it the ability to pauperize the people of Europe and starve its industries. Furthermore, Russia can eschew the dollar because it can now demand rubles in payment for its oil and natural gas. By freezing Russia’s dollar reserves the U.S. has unilaterally destroyed the value of its fiat currency. Who wants to hold monetary reserves that can be frozen by the issuing bank?
Meanwhile, America, self-sufficient in oil and gas thanks to its fracking technologies, and still enormously wealthy, will remain comfortably air-conditioned. But its long-term trade imbalance with China will inexorably weaken it. Militarily, it will be rendered impotent, dwarfed by the new hegemon headed by Russia and China.
I blame Hillary Clinton. It was she, along with her coterie of Democratic National Committee centrists, who refused to accept their electoral defeat in 2016. In an ironic twist on the Party’s inability to read the mood of the electorate – highlighted by Clinton’s characterization of those who supported the Republican candidate as ‘deplorables’ - it desperately sought a Deus ex machina that might explain their confounding loss. The two years leading up to the mid-terms of 2018 were spent in a sleazy campaign of personal vilification of the president (remember the Steele pee dossier?) and accusations of Russia’s meddling in the election through its manipulation of social media. In the event, the Justice Department’s Mueller Investigation into the President’s collusion with Russia turned out to be a damp squib and the Steele Dossier was discredited.
After regaining the House in 2018, Democrats were emboldened to initiate further Impeachment proceedings in 2019 when a new smoking gun was unholstered in the form of Trump’s attempt to leverage Military Aid to Ukraine for Zelensky’s help in gathering intelligence on Biden (in Trump’s sights as his potential 2020 presidential opponent) and his son Hunter’s self-serving dealings with some of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs (remember Hunter’s $85,000 a month gig with the oil giant Burisma?).
Never mind Trump’s ignominious rule as a racist, wannabe autocrat, and his stacking of the Supreme Court with right-wing stooges, the real fall-out from his four-year term was the relentless impugning of Russia as an ‘evil empire’, the stoking of a second cold war, the expansion of the military budget, and the complete trivialization of the Democrats – exposed as a party devoid of any vision for the 21st century beyond hapless recriminations for their defeat and gratuitous character assassination. As such it was perhaps inevitable that they would choose that aging bumbler, and international influence peddler, Joe Biden, as their standard bearer in 2020’s victory.
His victory, and the accession of Scholz in Germany emboldened Putin. The Russian leader now faces two old, weak, leaders who, in cahoots with the puerile Zelensky, believe they can bloody the bear’s nose. The two putative leaders of the free world have shackled themselves together as an emasculated ‘West’ in a newly dichotomous world.
There has been an extraordinary suppression of free speech related to a conflict half a world away, in which the U.S. is not even a declared combatant. The Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, famously noted that ‘In War, Truth is the first casualty.’ In the first few days of this conflict, access to the Russian news sites, RT and Sputnik was denied on the web. Now, Scott Ritter, a decorated Marine Corps veteran and former chief UN weapons inspector who exposed the lies being promoted by the Bush administration and its mouthpiece the NYT, concerning Iraq’s supposed weapons of Mass Destruction, has had his Twitter account canceled – for attempting to expose the culpability of the U.S. in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ten years after Bush II’s Iraq invasion, the NYT quoted him as averring, “Today everybody knows I was right. I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history. I was the only one who was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.”
Today, the NYT and Britain’s Guardian newspaper are mouthpieces for their respective country’s security services. It is impossible to trust their reportage – suffused as it is by blatant propaganda for, effectively, the American Empire – each supposed Russian war crime a reprise of the murder of 312 babies taken from their incubators in Kuwait, and long, long ago, other mythical babies skewered on German bayonets in WWI. Doubtless horrendous crimes are being committed on both sides. It is a war, despite Russian circumlocutions to the contrary. Nevertheless, there remain stalwart journalists who I believe are revealing the truth in odd corners of the web. We are seeing, despite the blanket coverage of mainstream media beholden to the State, glimpses of an unfolding reality that will, I am convinced, to paraphrase Ritter, prove to be one of the most significant portents in modern Global history.