By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 3/30/24

Ukraine is now on the verge of a catastrophic defeat. On the ground, recent Russian advances – especially since the fall of the key town (really, fortress) of Avdeevka – may not (yet) look rapid, but they are steady and have become highly predictable. Russia has the initiative, and it is a matter of Moscow’s decisions how fast the Ukrainian crumbling will be exploited. Once the Russian military commits its reserves (no, they have not yet entered the scene), the map could change with the kind of speed that will shock out of their dreams even the most propagandized victims of Western information warfare. This may happen very soon or a little bit later. But this war is now very unlikely to last into 2025.

We are also seeing clear signs of panic in the West and Kyiv/Kiev: Talk about the possibility of defeat has reached mainstream media and conformist “experts” – such as the German Christian Mölling – who have spent the last two years as relentless war boosters are rushing for the rhetorical exits. The blame game almost starts among those who have most to be ashamed of.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has told the public that he can imagine a peace based on the territorial status quo before the escalation into all-out-war of February 2022. For that, it is, of course, far too late. That solution – highly favorable to Ukraine, as its own then chief-negotiator has recently admitted – was on the table in the spring of 2022. But Kyiv/Kiev chose to be misled by the West which urged it to continue the war. As recent statements by the Russian leadership – all the way up to President Vladimir Putin – have made clear, such an offer will not be made again. This war will now end on terms much worse for Ukraine.  

Against this dismal backdrop, Strana.ua, one of Ukraine’s most important and popular news websites, is reporting that the Ukrainian military is struggling with an online gambling “epidemic.” And make no mistake, this is not a “scourge,” as Strana.ua puts it, restricted to those serving in the rear. According to prominent Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksy Honcharenko, 90 percent of those on the “frontlines” are gambling and betting so badly that they lose enough to go into debt. He believes that the problem is pervasive and severe enough to “destroy the morale” of the troops. Their return into civilian life – if they are lucky enough to return, of course – is marred by having “nothing,” and they’ll be “ideal targets for the world of crime.” So Honcharenko. [https://strana.news/news/461179-kak-ihromanija-stala-bichom-ukrainskoj-armii.html]

An army of men and women abused for a Western proxy war, indoctrinated and also often enough brutally cajoled by a regime that has sold out Ukraine’s interests and hundreds of thousands of lives to the (still) neocon strategies of Washington – and all that for what?

To be admitted into NATO? But that will not happen and was never a good idea to begin with. To defend democracy and “civil society”? But Ukraine has no democracy; it is a regime every bit as personal as that of Russia, and, if anything, more corrupt. “Civil society”? A label for those with decent English and good connections to Westerners. It means nothing for the many others churned up in a meatgrinder of a war. To join “the West”? Wait for the backlash once this war is over – probably soon – and Ukrainians will have to process the fact that the West has used them and then dropped them.

In short, there is nothing really surprising about the fact that Ukrainian soldiers have found a destructive form of escapism. As one of them puts it, “the longer the war is lasting, the more you want to distract yourself from the things going on around you, just forget about everything.” Soviet troops in Afghanistan and American ones in Vietnam used drugs for the same purpose. And yet, there is something almost too symbolic about the Ukrainians’ choice of self-ruin: Gambling and betting. They are imitating the sins of their leaders, as if in a collective gesture of despair as well as what is left of defiance. And, of course, having an addiction that eats up everything you may want if you survive, is a way of saying that you don’t much believe in your surviving, or – perhaps even worse – that you have stopped caring.

Ukrainians do not deserve their government of shortsighted gamblers – and losers. They do not deserve to have become dispensable chips in a geopolitical game that the West has bet on – and is losing. They deserve a rapid end to this war and a return to a life in peace that they enjoy enough not to want to gamble it away.

YouTube link here.

By James Carden, Landmarks Magazine (Substack), 4/3/24

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

The specter of Trump II haunts the dreams of those  who look back on the first Cold War and see not the terror of the Cuba Missile Crisis; the bloodletting of Vietnam; the move to DEFCON III in 1973; or the nuclear false alarms of the Carter and Reagan eras. Rather, they see a halcyon era wherein the US, led by a wise bipartisan establishment, weathered the storm thanks to the wise and patient application of the containment doctrine. 

To their barely concealed dismay, they realize that the years-long 100 billion dollar plus effort at propping up an authoritarian kleptocracy centered in Kiev is indeed flailing: The money is running out, and popular (as well as political)  support for the venture is on a downward trend. They see in Trump (wrongly, I happen to think) an existential threat to America’s proxy war in Ukraine and so, the administration and the US establishment are desperately trying to create a renewed sense of urgency regarding the Ukrainian war effort. Their project now needs, above all, a second wind, and reinvigoration requires invention. 

Once upon a time Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose ideological progeny now stalk the corridors of power in Joe Biden’s Washington, advised President Truman that the public case for the Truman Doctrine had to be “clearer than truth,” or, put another way, not true at all.

Having been debased by the decade-long editorship of Gideon Rose, the once august journal Foreign Affairs staggers along – a zombie from another time. But it maintains its uses to the established order. And one of its principle uses is to provide intellectual justification for the unjustifiable. It wouldn’t be the first time. By the late 1940s, the American people were exhausted and war weary. A second wind was needed and the threat of  a monolithic Communist threat provided the oxygen. George F. Kennan’s 1947 “X” article in the same journal served a similar purpose for the first Cold War, not dissimilar to Winston Churchill’s anti-communist clarion call in Fulton, Missouri the year before.

Kennan was brilliant, but he was also occasionally hysterical. And cooler heads, such as Walter Lippmann, realized that the “X” strategy condemned us to an unnecessarily drawn out and dangerous Cold War. As Lippmann biographer Ronald Steele points out,

…To confront the Soviets at “every point where they show signs of encroaching” was, Lippmann charged, a “strategic monstrosity” doomed to fail. It could be attempted only by “recruiting, subsidizing, and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets.” Propping up anticommunist regimes around the periphery of the Soviet Union would require unending American intervention.”

To Kennan’s great credit he soon came to realize that containment abetted militarization and presented militarists in government like Acheson, Paul Nitze, Frank Wisner, Allen and John Foster Dulles and many others besides, an intellectual and strategic framework to do their worst. Which they did.

The March 2024 issues of Foreign Affairs is once again playing its part – and while the dramatis personae are different, the story remains much the same. Which brings us, alas, to the article in question: “America’s New Twilight Struggle With Russia” by Max Bergmann, Michael Kimmage, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Maria Snegovaya. The first tip-off that the article’s purpose is to propagandize rather than inform is the presence of Bergmann on the byline. Bergmann, before ascending to his current perch at CSIS, worked under the shameless Clinton partisan Neera Tanden at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress where he directed a Neo-McCarthyite “Moscow Project,” one of the more unhinged products of an unhinged time. 

The four (!) authors argue for the broadest possible application of the containment doctrine in the most alarmist terms (“clearer than truth”).  “Kennan’s vision of containment focused primarily on Europe,” they write. “Today, post-Soviet Eurasia and the rest of the world will be more central.” [Emphasis mine]. 

We are further  told, “Ukraine’s defense is crucial for European stability and for preventing the spread of Russian power globally.” And still more, “Containing Russia in Ukraine means keeping the line of contact as close to the Russian border as possible, constraining Russia’s expansionist tendencies.” In other words, we are supposed to believe that a carve-out of Novorossiya presages an attempt by Russia to expand globally? The authors fail to note that Russia’s 2024 defense budget, at $109 billion, is roughly ten times less than US defense expenditures and ten times less than NATO defense spending. Where are they going to expand to?Transnistria? 

In the authors’ telling, Containment 2.0 will differ from the original through its steady application of American power throughout Asia. As they put it, “Any strategy for containing Russia must account for resource commitments to the Indo-Pacific and for the impact of U.S. policy on the Chinese-Russian relationship.” What they fail to acknowledge is that this has already been tried before – and the results did not redound to the benefit of the United States. The original iteration of containment, along with Paul Nitze’s militarization of it (though his authorship, in 1950, of NSC-68) set the stage for the ‘Domino theory’ which in turn begat Vietnam. I can confidently assume that at least two of the four authors are fully aware of this, but the purpose of the exercise, as I said, is propaganda not elucidation.

Withal, it never seems to occur to the authors that the war and its continuation hinge on one issue and one issue alone: NATO: No NATO, no war. Ukrainian neutrality was and remains the key to unravelling the Gordian knot. But recognizing this would require the authors to surrender their collective dream of a new Cold War in which they can play the part of architect, of grand strategist, of hero. 

In the end, the New Cold War needed a second wind and Foreign Affairs answered the call. 

Just like old times.

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.