By Wyatt Reed, The Grayzone, 4/17/24

The legal team representing high-powered insurers Lloyd’s and Arch says that since the Nord Stream explosions were “more likely than not to have been inflicted by… a government,” they have no responsibility to pay for damages to the pipelines. To succeed with that defense, the companies will presumably be compelled to prove, in court, who carried out those attacks. 

British insurers are arguing that they have no obligation to honor their coverage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which were blown up in September 2022, because the unprecedented act of industrial sabotage was likely carried out by a national government.

The insurers’ filing contradicts reports the Washington Post and other legacy media publications asserting that a private Ukrainian team was responsible for the massive act of industrial sabotage.

A legal brief filed on behalf of UK-based firms Lloyd’s Insurance Company and Arch Insurance states that the “defendants will rely on, inter alia, the fact that the explosion Damage could only have (or, at least, was more likely than not to have) been inflicted by or under the order of a government.”

As a result, they argue, “the Explosion Damage was “directly or indirectly occasioned by, happening through, or in consequence of” the conflict between Russia and Ukraine” and falls under an exclusion relating to military conflicts.

The brief comes a month after Switzerland-based Nord Stream AG filed a lawsuit against the insurers for their refusal to compensate the company. Nord Stream, which estimated the cost incurred by the attack at between €1.2 billion and €1.35 billion, is seeking to recoup over €400 million in damages.

Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first private investigative expedition to the blast sites of the Nord Stream pipelines, describes the insurers’ legal strategy as a desperate attempt to find an excuse to avoid honoring their indemnity obligations.

“If it’s an act of war and ordered by a government, that’s the only way they can escape their responsibility to pay,” Andersson told The Grayzone.

Following a report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh which alleged that the US government was responsible for the Nord Stream explosion, Western governments quickly spun out a narrative placing blame on a team of rogue Ukrainian operatives. Given the lack of conclusive evidence, however, proving that the explosions were “inflicted by or under the order of a government” would be a major challenge for defense lawyers.

Even if the plaintiffs in the case are able to wrest back the funds in court, they are likely to face other serious hurdles. Later in the brief, lawyers for Lloyd’s and Arch suggest that even if they were required to pay up, anti-Russian sanctions would leave their hands tied.

“In the event that the Defendants are found to be liable to pay an indemnity and/or damages to the Claimant,” the brief states, “the Defendants reserve their position as to whether any such payment would be prohibited by any applicable economic sanctions that may be in force at the time any such payment is required to be made.”

After they were threatened with sanctions by the US government, in 2021 Lloyd’s and Arch both withdrew from their agreement to cover damages to the second of the pipelines, Nord Stream 2. But though they remain on the hook for damages to the first line, the language used by the insurers’ lawyers seems to be alluding to a possible future sanctions package that would release them from their financial obligations. “Nord Stream 1 was not affected by those sanctions, but apparently sanctions might work retroactively to the benefit of insurers,” observes Andersson.

The plaintiffs may face an uphill battle at the British High Court in London, the city where Lloyd’s has been headquartered since its creation in 1689. As former State Department cybersecurity official Mike Benz observed, “Lloyd’s of London is the prize of the London banking establishment,” and “London is the driving force behind the transatlantic side of the Blob’s “Seize Eurasia” designs on Russia.”

But if their arguments are enough to convince a court in London, a decision in favor of the insurers would likely be a double-edged sword. Following Lloyd’s submission to US sanctions and its refusal to insure ships carrying Iranian oil, Western insurance underwriters (like their colleagues in the banking sector) are increasingly in danger of losing their global reputation for relative independence from the state. Should the West ultimately lose its grip on the global insurance market — or its reputation as a safe haven for foreign assets — €400 million will be unlikely to buy it back.

By Paul Robinson, Landmarks Magazine (Substack), 4/2/24

[Editor’s note: this is the second installment of the Simone Weil Center’s Symposium on ‘Containment 2.0.’ The first installment can be read here.]

There is an interesting line in Bergman, Kimmage, Mankoff, and Snegovaya’s article ‘America’s New Twilight Struggle with Russia,’ in which the authors talk of ‘checking Russian influence in Central Asia and Africa.’ The distance between the United States and Kazakhstan is about 6,500 miles. The distance between Russia and Kazakhstan is zero, as the two are neighbours. Yet for some strange reason, it is considered quite natural that the United States should seek to dominate a region 6,500 miles from its shores, whereas ‘Russian influence’ right on its own borders is deemed a threat that must somehow be contained.

This example aptly illustrates what one might consider the extreme self-centeredness of the call for a new policy of containment. The idea that other states might have legitimate interests, even next to their homes, is entirely absent, while the interests of the United States are deemed to span the entire globe. Moreover, it is taken for granted that American assistance is something that all people desire, that it is for the good of all, and moreover that it will inevitably produce positive outcomes for all concerned, other, of course, than a few malign actors. The fact that others might have different ideas, or that American assistance might actually be harmful rather than helpful is not considered. What is good for us is good for them.

The experience of containment in the Cold War tells a rather different story. Containment sounds like a relatively benign, peaceful strategy compared with ‘rollback,’ the alternative of the time that envisioned actively pushing communism back from its existing boundaries. In reality, containment was an extremely bloody affair. The war in Vietnam was possibly the most extreme example, but bloodshed followed containment almost everywhere outside Europe. The massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66, for instance, probably claimed the lives of about half a million people. Proxy wars backed by the United States in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) more. It is hardly an experience that one would wish to repeat.

To be fair, Bergmann et al. do admit that containment came with ‘abuses.’ They argue that outside of Europe, Containment 2.0 should rely not on military intervention but on economic and political assistance. But it is clear that the impetus for their proposal comes from the war in Ukraine and that in that instance their focus is, in fact, military. As they write: ‘that strategy should retain Ukrainian victory as a long-term goal. Forcing Russia to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied there will push the Russian threat further from Europe’s borders … a Ukrainian military victory will require larger and more sustained Western military assistance.’

Interestingly, the stated aim here is not actually containment but rollback – ‘forcing Russian to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied.’ This is an extremely ambitious program, and even if were achievable it could not be achieved without a very long war that would cost the lives of an extremely large number of people (including, of course, Ukrainians), as well as the wholesale destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure. Containment 2.0 is a recipe for prolonged and bloody war.

It’s also unlikely to succeed. War is full of uncertainty, so one can never tell for sure, but as things stand, the prospects of Ukraine recapturing most, or all, of its lost territory seem very low. Pursuing that goal will lead not merely to death and destruction, but to futile death and destruction.

This doesn’t seem to bother the new Cold Warriors. Convinced that they are ‘helping’ Ukraine, they lead it further into the abyss, just as their predecessors led Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans, and others into the abyss in decades past.

Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, one might complain that the issue here is a failure to follow Kant’s categorical imperative and to view people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. The end is weakening Russia and China, and if others suffer in the process, we shrug our shoulders and consider it a price worth paying, knowing full well that it is not us but others who are paying the price.

I think, though, that this complaint is not entirely accurate because the architects of these policies strike me not so much as cynics who know full well what they are doing but as true believers, who really imagine that their ‘help’ is in fact help, that the United States is a force for good in the world, and that spreading its influence and undermining that of others is thus for the benefit of all humanity.

This comes through in the talk of ‘support for governance reform and trade’ and of countering ‘Russian influence outside Europe primarily through development assistance, trade, and investment.’

The first thing to note about this is that it is not nearly as new as the authors would like readers to think it is. Development assistance, trade, and investment were key aspects of Cold War-era containment. From the mid-1950s, for instance, the United States invested heavily in southern Afghanistan, through projects such as the Helmand Valley Authority. Other developing countries were similar recipients of American aid. This built on modernization theory, developed by the likes of Eugene Staley and Walt Rostow, who imagined that one could export the experience of the American New Deal to Africa and Central Asia, enable local economies to ‘take off,’ build a liberal civil society, and at the end of it all save the recipients of US aid from communism.

It generally didn’t end well. US-backed irrigation projects in the Helmand Valley, for instance, left it not a blooming garden but a salty desert (I exaggerate a bit, but it is generally agreed that the results were not very positive). Similar outcomes appeared elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the world is littered with failed development assistance projects. If Bergmann et al., imagine that the United State has gotten better at this since the Cold War, they should read the reports of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which provide excruciating details of billions of dollars squandered on failed, and often counterproductive, aid projects in the years between 2001 and 2021. The U.S. and its allies imagined that they were helping Afghanistan, but their aid just made things worse. It is a recurring pattern. If I truly believed that the U.S. and its allies really knew what they were doing when it came to development assistance, support for good governance, and the like, I might support it. But the evidence suggests rather the opposite.

Beyond this, one gets no sense from Bergmann et al. that people outside Europe might not want American assistance or might not regard American models of development as appropriate for their circumstances. Their article speaks of the ‘brutality and corruption of Russian-backed juntas,’ by which one imagines they have in mind the military governments that have recently taken over countries such as Niger. But there is a reason why these ‘juntas’ seized power and seem to enjoy some popular support, and that is that their predecessors were themselves corrupt and incompetent. And if the Russians also enjoy some popular support in parts of Africa (as seems to be the case), it is because the Western backers of the previous regimes had become thoroughly disliked.

If Africans in some instances choose to prefer Russia over America, France, or Britain (a choice possibly partly determined by memories of colonialism and the Soviet Union’s support of national liberation struggles), who are we to tell them that they must do otherwise? There is, it seems to me, a profound arrogance to this approach, as well as unwillingness to consider that others might legitimately view things differently and have a right to go their own way.

At this point, it is perhaps necessary also to express what some might consider a somewhat cynical view about the expressed intent to promote U.S. interests by ‘supporting locally led initiatives to foster civil society.’ Superficially, it sounds totally benign. Dig a bit deeper, though, and there are grounds for concern.

In its broadest definition, civil society includes any organization operating outside the purview of the state, from the local knitting club upwards. In the meaning more often used by Western politicians, in the context of countries they do not like, civil society is a much narrower concept. It is more strictly a Westernizing, liberal civil society. The term civil society thus refers to that segment of society that is politically opposed to the ruling regime, wishes to advance Western understandings of democracy and human rights, align its country more closely politically with the West, and more generally Westernize that country’s institutions and values. As such it is often at odds with much of the surrounding population. Western support for it can prove deeply destabilizing, particularly when civil society of such a sort succeeds in taking power against the wishes of important segments of the population, leading to a backlash and in the worst circumstances civil war. This is more or less what happened in Ukraine in 2014. Beyond that, overt Western support for this kind of civil society may have the effect of tainting it in the eyes of the authorities, resulting in its suppression. This can be seen in Russia, where the association of liberal civil society with the West has arguably had the effect of persuading the state that it is a fifth column being promoted by the West to undermine the state from within. By promoting democracy and liberal values in such a way, Western states can inadvertently undermine it.

The repeated failures not only of military intervention but also of development assistance, democracy promotion, and the like, never seems to stop Western liberal internationalists from wanting to do the same thing all over again. This reveals another serious deficiency – a lack of self-awareness. Such is our certainty that we are the ‘good guys’ that we seem all too often to be incapable of understanding that our record does not match our expressed intention and that others might therefore have very good reason to view us as a danger. When, for instance, Russians say that they view NATO expansion as a threat, they are dismissed as talking nonsense. In our minds, we know that NATO is purely defensive. If others think something different, they are wrong, and should therefore be ignored. But it doesn’t actually matter if they are wrong. If that is how they will think, it will affect their behaviour, and it must therefore be taken into consideration.

Take, for instance, the article under discussion. How do the authors imagine it will be received in Moscow or Beijing? Do they imagine that people there will somehow reconsider their actions? Or is it more likely that on reading it, even sceptics will conclude that their leaders are right, that the West is out to get them, and that they must therefore resist? I suspect that the latter answer is more likely. If so, Containment 2.0 is likely to prove deeply counterproductive.

By Volodymyr Ishchenko, Facebook, 4/16/24

Ishchenko is a left-wing Ukrainian sociologist and a Research Fellow at Alameda Institute and works at Research Associate at Osteuropa-Institut Berlin and is a member at PONARS Eurasia.

Foreign Affairs published a very well researched article by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko on the Istanbul talks based on previously unpublished drafts of the peace agreement. It argues against a number of myths and misconceptions about why the talks failed and also why the war started.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine

In particular, they argue against the explanation that the talks failed because it was allegedly impossible to continue negotiations with Russia after the discovery of the war crimes in Bucha.

“Still, the behind-the-scenes work on the draft treaty continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”

Unfortunately, the authors did not mention that the most systematic evidence we have shows that the public opinion in Ukraine was favorable to the negotiations with Russia to end the war even after Bucha. A poll commissioned by NDI in May 2022 showed that 59% of Ukrainians supported negotiations with Russia.

Since then, that number has plummeted, reflecting overheated expectations of Ukraine’s victory, fueled in particular by the West. P. 20 here:

Click to access May%202023_wartime%20survey_Public%20version_%20Eng.pdf

Considering all the methodological issues and biases with war-time polling in Ukraine, 59% was an indication of a strong majority for negotiations. Just after the loss of Bakhmut, support for negotiations began to rise, despite more war crimes and bombing of energy infrastructure. What may be relevant here is the possible pressure of a better organized, mobilized, and armed minority camp against a fragmented, disorganized, and disarticulated majority. The same class and political asymmetry that contributed to the stagnation of Minsk agreements.

https://brill.com/view/journals/rupo/8/2/article-p127_2.xml

The article also challenges the ethnonationalist explanation of the war. Its defenders would have to argue that the very “identity” issues that the negotiating parties considered least important for a peace agreement were supposedly the most important reasons for starting the war

“Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed; that was clear by early March. Perhaps he was now willing to cut his losses if he got his longest-standing demand: that Ukraine renounce its NATO aspirations and never host NATO forces on its territory. If he could not control the entire country, at least he could ensure his most basic security interests, stem the hemorrhaging of Russia’s economy, and restore the country’s international reputation.

Second, the drafts contain several articles that were added to the treaty at Russia’s insistence but were not part of the communiqué and related to matters that Ukraine refused to discuss. These require Ukraine to ban “fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, and aggressive nationalism”—and, to that end, to repeal six Ukrainian laws (fully or in part) that dealt, broadly, with contentious aspects of Soviet-era history, in particular the role of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.

It is easy to see why Ukraine would resist letting Russia determine its policies on historical memory, particularly in the context of a treaty on security guarantees. And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.

It is also possible, however, that the provisions were intended to allow Putin to save face. For example, by forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of “denazification,” even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government.

In the end, it remains unclear whether these provisions would have been a deal-breaker. The lead Ukrainian negotiator, Arakhamia, later downplayed their importance.”

The evidence is still consistent with the class conflict explanation. Putin could have agreed to the compromise (and may now be genuinely sending negotiating signals) precisely because he had already achieved his main transformative goals for Russia.

Last but not least. Although the authors reject the cartoonish argument that the West “forced” Zelenskyi to abandon the deal, they do not deny the “agency” of Boris Johnson and the US elite and their share of responsibility for the failure of the talks.

“[I]nstead of embracing the Istanbul communiqué and the subsequent diplomatic process, the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia, including through an ever-tightening sanctions regime.

Notwithstanding Putin’s manipulative spin, Arakhamia was pointing to a real problem: the communiqué described a multilateral framework that would require Western willingness to engage diplomatically with Russia and consider a genuine security guarantee for Ukraine. Neither was a priority for the United States and its allies at the time.

In their public remarks, the Americans were never quite so dismissive of diplomacy as Johnson had been. But they did not appear to consider it central to their response to Russia’s invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv two weeks after Johnson, mostly to coordinate greater military support. As Blinken put it at a press conference afterward, “The strategy that we’ve put in place—massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts—is having real results.”

The Western officials who dissuaded Zelenskyi from the peace deal and instead fueled exaggerated expectations of Ukraine’s victory with promises of support “for as long as it takes” surely understood the consequences and who will pay most of the price. The authors attribute it to the risk aversion to commit to the war with Russia. Ironically, we ended up in a situation where the risk of a world war with Russia has only become higher than it was in 2022, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of lost lives and urban destruction.

Was it just a mistake to underestimate Russia? As with Putin’s decision to launch the invasion, it was probably a combination of mistake and rational interest. As I feared back in March 2022, if the West ONLY sends weapons and escalates sanctions without pursuing a diplomatic path, it means that at least a part of the Western elites was actually interested in this war.

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46153/stopping-the-war-is-the-absolute-priority

By Kevin Gosztola, Substack, 4/22/24

On April 20, Edward Snowden declared, “America lost something important today, and hardly anyone heard. The headlines of state-aligned media screech and crow about the nefarious designs of your fellow citizens and the necessity of foreign wars without end, but find few words for a crime against the Constitution.”

The NSA whistleblower was referring to the United States Senate reauthorizing and expanding surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

President Joe Biden circulated a memo that cast the Fourth Amendment right to privacy as a “threat to national security.” Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Attorney General Merrick Garland called members of Congress to ensure that they voted to give spy agencies renewed power.

Specifically, “Patriot Act 2.0,” as Representative Zoe Lofgren called it, broadened the definition of service providers and exponentially increased the power that the government has to force numerous business and industries to aid warrantless surveillance. 

Senator Ron Wyden strongly opposed the legislation and even introduced an amendment that would have prevented this assault on civil liberties. But the Senate rejected his effort to protect privacy. 

“The Senate waited until the 11th hour to ram through renewal of warrantless surveillance in the dead of night,” Wyden stated. He also added, “It is clear from the votes on very popular amendments that senators were unwilling to send this bill back to the House, no matter how common-sense the amendment before them.”

Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) renewed Section 702 until April 2025, allowing lawmakers plenty of time to appropriately draft and amend legislation, panic was stirred by Biden and the national security state.

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Wyden, who has a track record of challenging surveillance, did not mince words. He described the provision that he fought, which was dubbed the “Make Everyone A Spy” provision, as “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”

“It allows the government to force any American who installs, maintains, or repairs anything that transmits or stores communications to spy on the government’s behalf. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, or a phone. It would be secret: the Americans receiving the government directives would be bound to silence, and there would be no court oversight.”

Forcing More Service Providers To Spy On Customers

The Biden administration applauded the passage of legislation that expanded warrantless surveillance. “The President will swiftly sign the bill into law, ensuring that our security professionals can continue to rely on Section 702 to detect grave national security threats and use that understanding to protect the United States,” Sullivan stated. 

Section 702 used to primarily apply to telecommunications or technology companies. Now, as detailed by Demand Progress, Section 702 may be used to force business landlords, cleaning contractors, delivery personnel, utility providers, etc, to help U.S. security agencies spy without probable cause.

Entities and individuals required to help with surveillance cannot speak about it. Their First Amendment speech rights are curtailed as they violate their customers’ Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

Also, according to Demand Progress, House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes drafted the expanded surveillance reauthorization without defining terms like “any other service provider,” “access to equipment,” or “custodian.”

Only as a result of opposition did security hawks insert an exemption for coffee shops, hotels, and libraries.

Writing about the impact on journalism for The Nation, longtime national security journalist James Bamford wrote, “A requirement could easily be added to Section 702 that compels the need for a warrant as soon as an NSA employee or FBI agent recognizes that the communication involves a journalist conducting an interview, or an attorney engaged in a conversation with a client or source.”

“In the end,” Bamford argued, “insight gained from the American journalist’s interaction with a foreign source may be far more valuable and provide considerably more insight than inhibiting sources to interact with journalists.” 

The FBI consistently abused the surveillance power it was granted under Section 702 before the authority was reauthorized. It is a certainty that the FBI will abuse this ill-defined authority handed to them by Biden and Congress. 

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No Justification For Opposing A Warrant

House Speaker Mike Johnson was at one point an opponent of warrantless surveillance under FISA. He claimed that he shifted his position because as Speaker he is privy to “confidential briefings” that have showed him how critical Section 702 is to “national security.”

“I personally used 702 authorities at NSA,” Snowden responded. “There is absolutely nothing in any briefing of any level, then or now, that would justify opposition to recognizing the government’s obligation to seek a warrant for searches of Americans’ communications, which are constitutionally-protected.”

“And frankly, let’s be serious: the NSA and FBI have plainly demonstrated that they’re more than comfortable violating the law when they feel it binds too tightly. 278,000 times just for one auth: 702. Millions and millions of times under others for [President Barack] Obama. And on a literally innumerable scale under [President George W.] Bush—we couldn’t even count it.”

“So let’s not pretend that, in the apocryphal ‘ticking time-bomb’ scenario of the Hollywood imagination, that a series of agencies which have since their inception been characterized by a criminally casual respect for the Constitution would feel in the slightest way encumbered by something as parochial as the law,” Snowden added. “After all, the legislation rarely ascribes penalties for federal infractions.”

The House Judiciary Committee passed legislation—the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act—at the end of 2023 that would have required a warrant for any U.S. person search. However, through the House Intelligence Committee, U.S. officials thwarted attempts to constrain the national security state.

During a private meeting on reauthorization, WIRED reported that Turner “presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms [would be] detrimental to national security.” 

It is highly likely that antiwar or pro-Palestinian protests, particularly on college or university campuses, will be targeted. Biden will probably have no problem with using this expanded spying power against students. 

A day after Biden signed the reauthorization bill, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates accused student demonstrators opposed to Israel’s assault on Gaza of “echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations.”

Hawkishly Backing The National Security State

Back in 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned against retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that helped Bush engage in warrantless wiretapping. He even promised to filibuster the FISA Amendments Act. But Obama voted for the bill when there were 46 different lawsuits pending against the companies and angered many progressives and civil liberties advocates. 

Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, did not even pretend to support reform, greater accountability, or limits to government surveillance. Fifteen years after Obama flip-flopped, Sullivan, his national security advisor, made it clear that the administration believed that “failure to reauthorize Section 702” would be “one of the worst intelligence failures of our time.”

He additionally urged Congress to reauthorize Section 702 “without new and operationally damaging restrictions on reviewing intelligence” and “with measures that build on proven reforms.” That was subtle language, which sent a message to representatives and senators that Biden opposed adding a warrant requirement to protect Americans’ privacy rights.

Hawkish lawmakers, intelligence officials, and the Biden White House conspired to pass an updated surveillance law that not only avoided meaningful reforms but also expanded the law in a way that U.S. intelligence agencies could only dream about a year or two ago.

For many months, news reports detailed stories of spying abuses and enraged lawmakers. That gave some hope to those in favor of privacy that Congress might rein in government surveillance. Yet the national security state stayed the course. They once again hid the truth from elected officials, accelerated the process, and fear-mongered and spread propaganda to escape accountability. 

By Gordon Hahn, Landmarks Magazine (Substack), 4/1/24

The Simone Weil Center’s Symposium on ‘Containment 2.0’

On March 6, 2024, there appeared in Foreign Affairs a noteworthy article. Penned by four authors (Max Bergmann, Michael Kimmage, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Maria Snegovaya), the article is titled “America’s New Twilight Struggle with Russia: To Prevail, Washington Must Revive Containment.” 

As the article’s title makes clear, the authors are calling on the U.S. to return, in its relations with today’s Russian Federation, to essentially the same multi-faceted (and costly) global strategy of resistance to the USSR that was recommended, back in 1947, by George Kennan.

Whatever its possible weaknesses, such a policy has at least the clear benefit of not requiring fundamental changes in how anyone thinks about international politics — one is almost tempted to say that the proposal doesn’t require thought tout court. Western military alliances, Western think tanks, Western politicians, can simply let inertia continue to carry them forward, and as they do so, carry along with them the rest of the world. 

Will that be a good thing, however — for us, for the world at large? In an effort to mount a serious response to this enormously consequential question, we put out an appeal to our associated scholars and friends of the Simone Weil Center. Over the coming weeks, we will be publishing their responses in Landmarks.  

–  Paul Grenier 

The proposal for a “new American twilight struggle with Russia” and a “new containment” policy which recently appeared in Foreign Affairs offers us nothing more than a continuation of the policy that has already led to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – NATO expansion. The co-authors are in effect calling on the West to double, triple, and quadruple down on stupid on an even grander scale. 

After all, what, in effect if not intent, has been the policy of NATO expansion right up to Russia’s borders? Answer: a de facto ‘New Containment.’ The ‘post-Cold War’ New Containment based on NATO expansion and the attendant policies employed in order to achieve it – democracy-promotion, colour revolutions, economic sanctions,  the arming and equipping of Islamist and nationalist extremists in ‘target countries’ – led directly to the ‘New Cold War,’ as well as to the ongoing NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, and a series of preceding wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Libya, and Syria. Now four Foreign Affairs authors are proposing an extension and expansion of post-Cold War New Containment in what will be the creation of global Containment 2.0 motivated once again by the pursuit of a now elusive American hegemony and the quest for total security by way of NATO expansion (or ‘integration into Western institutions’) and another escalation of the New Cold War. 

Containment 2.0’s geography, according to the authors’ concept, marks “the most important difference” from Containment 1.0, under which NATO was the lead mechanism. New containment’s geography should not encompass Europe “primarily,” as the old containment did. Instead, “post-Soviet Eurasia and the rest of the world will be more central.” In other words, as its focus, the West’s Containment 2.0 should substitute Europe with all of Eurasia, in reality Great Eurasia — MacKinder’s “World Island” — stretching east-west from China to the English Channel, and north-southfrom the Indian Ocean to the Arctic. The entire globe becomes the outer concentric circle of the core area of interest and a secondary area of economic, political, developmental (colour revolution/democracy-promotion), intelligence, and military operations. The key “flash points” are located along “Russia’s western periphery” as they have been ever since NATO began to expand after the Cold War. The West should work on integrating “Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine” (GUAM becomes GUAAM) into “Western institutions” – i.e. NATO (and the EU) – while “checking Russian influence in Central Asia” (and Africa).  

Outside Eurasia, the authors recommend military action to “contest Russian influence outside Europe” as a secondary strategy. There, Containment 2.0 should “primarily” deploy “development assistance, trade, and investment.” Thus, a West that is less robust and dominant economically than when it inaugurated Kennan’s Containment 1.0 in the post-World War II years will be expanding its sphere of ‘vital’ interests or domination to the entire globe, thereby expending even greater financial and military resources. This is being recommended in the aftermath of what is emerging as a failed effort to expand its domination to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine, sparking wars and chaos in the bargain. Although this expansion and overextension would be merely making explicit and declared what has already been the implicit and undeclared policy in Washington, London, and Brussels since the Cold War’s end, it suggests a more intensive effort in its geographical, operational, financial, and budgetary dimensions. 

The authors are aware that the international context of the New and Old Containments differ, but they are not aware enough. They note that just as during the First Cold War, the West will face off in the Second Cold War against not just Russia but also China as well. But they pass over the facts that China is far more powerful economically than the USSR was, that there is no Sino-Soviet rift offering opportunities for peeling one of them off from their tight  geopolitical near-alliance, and that China and Russia are proving far more adept than were Russian and Chinese communists at rallying powerful states in vitally important regions such as the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim worlds and indeed elsewhere across the world’s continents.  BRICS+ is never mentioned, nor is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Yet the former has attracted three Middle Eastern states that the authors hope to rely on in the region. Most disturbingly, the authors also fail to note or consider important that a fundamental “novelty of the present moment” compared with the onset of the First Cold War and Containment 1.0 is that today NATO is already deeply involved in – is effectively a combatant-party – in a European war against Containment’s target.

What will be the mechanisms to implement Containment 2.0? One can be sure that one, if not the leading one will be that very same NATO at war with Russia in Ukraine. A return to and expansion of ‘out-of-area operations’ will be ensured, and the transformation of NATO into a global rather than a European military alliance is all but certain. The opening of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization office in Japan was the first toll of that bell. Cooperation between NATO, AUKUS and QUAD will grow and be subject to being parlayed into the formation of a global NATO by some other name. NATO expansion’s internal logic of eternal expansion – the need to secure new, newer, and newest ‘flanks’ – will be locked in as a result of the proposed Containment 2.0.

The authors’ policy would mean the West would eschew seeking a modus vivendi, a mutually acceptable security architecture with Russia or any agreement regarding Ukraine. This proposal demonstrates that many in Washington intend to persist in expanding NATO “irrespective of how the war in Ukraine ends.” Indeed, the authors think that “even if Ukraine does not achieve total victory on the battlefield, it could nevertheless be integrated militarily and politically with the West”! Pursuit of a Containment 2.0 will lock in confrontation and likely also further military conflict with Russia, whether through proxies or otherwise, and so perhaps with China as well.  Of particular importance is another result that follows from the authors’ typical, for Washington, lack of self-awareness. They ignore that the project of insisting on NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a project which was pursued for over a quarter of a century, revived what is typically called ‘Russian paranoia,’ but what is in reality a quite rational security vigilance strain in Russia’s strategic and political culture in respect to the West.

Historically, divisive cultural and political influences, interference in Russia’s domestic affairs, interventions of various sorts, and numerous military invasions from the West have taught Russians to distrust the very West they have often sought to emulate. The post-Cold War era has seen this pattern repeat, with the revival and renewed dominance of Russia’s traditional security vigilance culture vis-a-vis the West after having gone through a period, during perestroika and the post-perestroika 1990s, when Russia’s traditional security culture had receded into the background.  This is the result of the West having rejected the path of a strong, not open-ended but sufficient, American and Western security order enveloped in a balanced global security architecture. 

The West’s relentless post-Cold war pursuit of a ‘new world order’ of maximal American power, dominance, and hegemony across the globe has its very own emblem: it is the emblem of NATO. Intensifying NATO expansion in the form of Containment 2.0 will exacerbate these trends, entailing still more escalation in the relationship as Russians become even more convinced that the rationale of their security vigilance norm vis-à-vis the West is the correct path, even a special Russian calling. This will inspire a new, even an official state ideology in Russia and perhaps elsewhere that will be anchored in animosity toward the West. In the West itself, the escalating, already partly hot New Cold War will lead to further enlargement and authoritarianization under the national security state. 

The Containment 2.0 proposal further confirms my own suspicions that the slogan ‘long war’ in relation to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War is the product of the aspirations among certain elements in Washington that the Ukrainian war be dragged out, because this is to the West’s advantage. Regardless of the risks of escalation, they believe the West must prolong some form of armed resistance to Russia in Ukraine. Indeed, as the authors put it, “Containment should be implemented “for as long as necessary,”[emphasis mine – GH] and “Ukrainian victory” is “a long-term goal.”  They appear to define ‘victory’ as “(f)orcing Russia to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied.” But the authors propose no new specific strategies or tactics for how to defeat Russia in Ukraine or how to “push the Russian threat farther from Europe’s borders” – other, that is, than by sending insufficient military aid packets from Europe of $50 billion and the still-unapproved American packet of $60 billion. This means continuing the war ‘to the last Ukrainian’ for as long as it takes for Russian forces to reach the Polish border. After Kiev’s defeat in conventional war, it will require proceeding to build and sustain a partisan insurgency movement in any post-war pro-Russian or occupied Ukraine or rump neutral Ukraine. 

The long war is designed not only for the domestic political purpose of holding off a full collapse of the Ukrainian front until America’s November election. No, this next ‘twilight struggle’ must last as long as it takes to achieve ‘regime change’ in ‘Putin’s Russia,’ or, failing that, the West’s hoped for succession crisis in Russia could provide another opening for making good on the West’s ‘right’ to expand NATO to Ukraine and beyond.