By Conor Gallagher, Naked Capitalism, 4/14/24

I recently came across this piece from the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are core to its identity.”

The Century Foundation calls itself a “a progressive, independent think tank,” and this particular piece appears to mean well but is just as disconnected from reality than all the neocon think tanks’ war mongering policy papers saying Washington will prevail as it takes on Russia, China, Iran, and whoever else it feels like.

The Century Foundation authors possess a Hollywoodized idea of America that isn’t a land filled with brutal class struggle but virtue, which flow out into its foreign policy that stands for international humanitarian or human rights law. I think anyone with a basic understanding of current events or recent history knows how ridiculous this is, and yet it is repeated ad nauseam by every purported think tank. I suppose this is a classic example of Upton Sinclair’s saying that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” but I think the Century Foundation is onto something with its focus on values. It’s just that it has it backwards. The problem is that values are what has the US  on the brink of starting World War III in multiple locations.

So what are the core values that do have it such a position – and whose are they?

I think the story of former US President Herbert Hoover is instructive. He had interests in mines in Russia until they were seized by the Bolsheviks. [1] Hoover never forgot about it and remained terrified of Communists for the rest of his life – and for good reason considering how much he stood to lose.

Though Hoover got booted out of office in 1932, he played a central role in organizing capitalists to counter worker organization both in the US and abroad. His legacy lives on at Stanford’s neocon Hoover Institution. Throughout his life, he remained a major admirer of pre-Soviet Russia: “At the top was a Russian noble family and at the bottom 100,000 peasants and workers with nobody much in between but the priesthood and the overseers.”

That pretty much sums up the capitalist class’ enduring vision not just for Russia, but everywhere. Ownership of Russian mines or Opium Wars in China might not factor much into my or your everyday life, but you can bet it’s an important part of American ruling class ideology. Whose values? The dominant value at play there is a belief that as Western capitalists they have a right and a duty to exploit and profit off of every corner of the globe. Just like capital must dominate labor, it must expand and find new sources of revenue. If governments in Russia and China impede that progress, they must be destroyed.

Rather than bromides like more American “values,” the following are some questions or thought exercises for think tanks to consider – whether they want to win another war or maybe even quit starting so many of them.

Can You Practice Realpolitik with Gangsters? 

The US is a market state that is dominated by and run for transnational capital. Its foreign policy and the military are a tool of the American oligarchy. Therefore, any serious policy discussion needs to deal with the fact that national interests as they’re expressed today are not in any real sense national but representative of the interests of a small cohort of the super wealthy.

When US officials go on about spreading “freedom,” they’re not lying. It’s just their idea of freedom is a state devoted to high profits – free from the political whims of local populations that could degrade an investment’s expected return.

Let’s remember there likely wouldn’t be any problem with Russia had Putin not put an end to the 1990s shock therapy administered by the Western finance capitalists who were making a killing by pillaging Russian resources. Like Bert Hoover, they’re haunted by that opportunity snatched away from them, and they’ve been trying to get it back for a quarter century now.

The question is will American capital ever voluntarily give up? Will it ever say “okay, we’re satisfied with what we’ve got here, you do your thing in your sphere of influence”?

It’s not like Moscow and Beijing haven’t tried. Russia for example floated the idea of joining NATO or working out some other security arrangement. For decades after the end of the USSR, Russia tried to be accepted into the West’s club to no avail.

China, too, constantly repeats the refrain that the world is big enough for both Beijing and Washington. It invited the US to join it in its Belt and Road Initiative. The US could have helped steer projects that would have benefited both countries. While such cooperation between the two big powers wouldn’t be a panacea for all the world’s problems, it would likely mean a lot better spot than current one.  Instead the US wanted the whole pie and instead we got the TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan and/or the South China Sea.

There is a lot of confusion over why the West keeps escalating in a losing effort. Why, for example, are Western governments going around begging for shells to send Ukraine rather than accepting the L? The desperation seems to stem from the creeping realization that their system is coming undone. The entire post-WWII elite American mindset is built on the foundation of worldwide profit expansion via silicon and fire, and if they throw everything at Russia and lose, well a whole new domino theory could come into play – one where parasitic Western finance capital is driven back. (Granted it might in most cases be replaced by a more local form, but it’s nonetheless frightening for the Western honchos.)  Just look at what’s happening to France in Françafrique! And the US in the Middle East!

The fact that the West can no longer even manufacture enough weapons to supply its proxy wars almost certainly means that the dominoes will keep falling. This is a jolt to the system – described here by Malcolm Harris in his 2023 book Palo Alto:

War Capitalism could put on a blindfold and run into a maze of horrific, absurd plans with confidence because it had class power echolocation for a guide: As long as the rich strengthened and the working class weakened, then things had to be going in the right direction. It didn’t matter that capitalists were investing in finance sugar highs, monopoly superprofits, and an international manufacturing race to the bottom rather than strong jobs and an expanded industrial base. The twenty-first century was going to be all about software anyway, baby. The robots will figure it out. Silicon Valley leaders sat on top of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting foundation by a rich tower of cream.

They likely still feel insulated from the consequences of their actions, which fall most heavily on their proxy fighters and the working class dealing with inflation and declining living standards, but the panic over this system’s implosion is real – and with good reason. The idea that the US  can just spend more money and develop more wonder weapons is breaking down in humiliating fashion.

The great danger is that a Western capitalist class with no memory of a world war views the fight against Russia or China as more than just an effort to strategically weaken them. To evoke Hoover, they must regain access to their mines in Russia or risk losing them everywhere, which would make this an existential fight for Western governments and the capital they serve. On the opposing side, Russian officials have already said its military operation against the West in Ukraine is an existential one. Well, then we have opposing nuclear-armed sides both viewing this as an existential fight.

The Great Irony in the West’s Predicament Is That Finance Capital’s Own Greed Has Eroded Its Ability to Satiate Its Greed Around the World.

They hollowed out the West in order to make a quick buck. Where the manufacturing isn’t completely gone, it’s entirely degraded (Boeing). Government has been reduced to a collection of worthless sycophants only looking to cash in on their servitude.

It was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018 – and that’s only from shipping jobs to China.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers calculates that Wall Street strip mining of the US (including China, NAFTA, stock buybacks, etc.) has led to 30 million laid-off Americans since 1996. No wonder they’re desperate for new markets. But let’s focus on China for a moment, which vies for the number one spot on the enemy list with Russia.

The wilful decimation of the US’ manufacturing over recent decades destroyed its research capacity. It means the US relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly behind the increased defense spending in the first place.

It was impossible to know this would happen, they say, despite warnings at the time that this very situation would arise. Workers knew. Here’s a piece from the New York Times back in 2000 titled “Unions March Against China Trade Deal”:

Thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers, auto workers and other union members rallied on Capitol Hill and swept through the halls of Congress today in a show of muscle intended to block a trade agreement with China.

Their message, conveyed by union leaders and rank-and-file members who came from as far away as Michigan and Nebraska, was that trade was working for American corporations but not for American workers.

…[the union members] said, they are only opposing a deal with a country that does not respect workers’ rights and would stop at nothing, in their view, to steal the jobs that are the backbone of the American middle class.

Not surprisingly, when Politico did a 20-year-anniversary story on China’s accession to the WTO, most US lawmakers didn’t want to talk about their vote to normalize trade relations with China in 2000 (which paved the way to the WTO). But four American “experts” who did the planning and negotiating of the normalization of trade ties with China are described in the POLITICO piece as having zero regrets. Why would they? They were rewarded with better positions.

It’s entirely unclear how exactly the US would conduct this war it wants so much with China considering it’s so reliant on it for minerals and components crucial to the American military. As Army Technology points out:

The US Department of the Interior released a list of 35 minerals it deems essential to the economic and national security in 2018 (updated in 2022), amongst them many [rare earth elements]. The problem for the US is that the local production of these materials is hugely limited.

The extent of reliance on imports varies from mineral to mineral. Beryllium is mainly used to create lightweight material used in fighter jets, lithium is essential for modern battery production and tin is used in electronics, including soldier semiconductors, a sector that is projected to reach a value of $17.5bn by 2030.

Whereas the US produces some of the minerals mentioned above, it entirely relies on China and other countries for many other supplies. Cerium is used in batteries and in most devices with a screen and magnets forged from neodymium and samarium are impervious to extreme temperatures that are used in fighter jet fin actuators, missile guidance, control systems, aircraft and tank motors, satellite communications and radar and sonar systems.

Here again, it was Wall Street that moved rare earth and other mineral processing to China, that sold off mining operations to Chinese companies, and reaped the rewards for doing so. Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce tell the story in a 2019 piece at The American Conservative:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA’s investment wasn’t restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.

China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth,” to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.

Two of Xiaoping’s sons-in-law approached investment banker Archibald Cox, Jr. in the mid-1990s to use his hedge fund as a front for their companies to buy the U.S. rare-earth magnet enterprise. They were successful, purchasing and then moving the factory, the Indiana jobs, the patents, and the expertise to China. This was not the only big move, as Cox later moved into a $12 million luxury New York residence. The result is remarkably similar to Huawei: the United States has entirely divested of a technology and market it created and dominated just 30 years ago. China has a near-complete monopoly on rare earth elements, and the U.S. military, according to U.S. government studies, is now 100 percent reliant upon China for the resources to produce its advanced weapon systems.

Can the US expect its proxy warriors to keep enlisting if they’re armed with sticks and kitchen knives going up against hypersonic missiles?

A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China. Has there been any movement on this or is there just an assumption that AI will figure it out?

Let’s say, for arguments sake that the US ponied up $1 trillion tomorrow to help firms bring back this manufacturing, what other problems would arise? There’s at least one, which is already evident from the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act. According to this tracker, $263 billion has been invested and 113,400 jobs have been created, but a major problem has arisen. There aren’t enough workers with the necessary skills.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company had to delay the production start date of its Arizona plants to 2025 due to a lack of workers, and a major shortage is expected to continue in coming years. The shipyard building the US Navy’s new frigate can’t find workers, leading to a three-year delay – at least. Apply that to other industries, add in the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and the price keeps climbing.

There’s also the issue of how to check the power of parasitic finance capitalists that would immediately start to erode any efforts to improve the national situation.

Reining In US Finance Capitalism 

This brings us to another great irony.

Anyone in the US government with a few marbles left and a desire to make the US a strong nation state again should be looking to an unlikely source for advice on how to rein in the US oligarchy; they should talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin who successfully tamed the oligarchy in his country – at least at points where it would impede national interest.

The American system has failed to reform even slightly on its own, which means the hollowed out imperial force is now being repeatedly exposed and driven back by force abroad. There are parallels to Russia during the First World War when industrial and bureaucratic shortcomings, economic hardship, and a government lacking legitimacy led to the rise of the Bolsheviks.

I have yet to see a think tank recommend that yet, but at the rate the US keeps starting wars, they’d better think of something fast.

Notes

[1] It’s interesting to note that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s great grandfather had a textile empire in Russia. He had one of the biggest fortunes in the country, but the enterprises were nationalized following the 1917 revolutions.

by George Beebe & Anatol Lieven, Harper’s, 4/30/24

More than two years into Russia’s invasion, it is increasingly clear that the Ukrainian army is not capable of reconquering the territories lost to Russia; instead, without continued and massive Western aid, the Ukrainians will suffer eventual defeat owing to Russia’s huge economic and demographic superiority, and the long-term continuation of such aid cannot be guaranteed. Sanctions have not cratered Russia’s economy or crippled its war effort. Russia has corrected many of the problems that plagued its forces during the war’s first year and pursued an attrition strategy that is steadily exhausting Ukraine’s supply of fighters, emptying Western weapons stockpiles, and sapping U.S. and European political patience. Current trends are pointing not toward a lasting stalemate but toward Ukraine’s eventual collapse.

The United States should seek negotiations now. As the shake-up in Ukraine’s military leadership earlier this year and news reports of the exhaustion of Ukrainian troops portend, its time may indeed be much shorter than most Western analysts realize. The soldiers on the front lines speak of back-to-back deployments, falling numbers of troops, declining supplies of ammunition, and apparently inexhaustible Russian reserves. Western aid should therefore be continued, as the alternative is likely to be a situation in which Russia will dictate, rather than negotiate, terms of a settlement. But this aid should also be envisioned not as a means to secure victory but as a source of leverage in negotiations.

The only viable terms for such a compromise are that Russia abandons its hopes of conquering more Ukrainian territory and reducing the whole of Ukraine to a client state—and in return, the West meets Russia’s basic concerns about its own security and provides a path toward reestablishing normal economic relations.

The Biden Administration, for its part, is trying to sustain the Ukrainian defense in what has become a war of attrition, while deferring any serious talk of negotiations. The hope is that this strategy can succeed until at least after the U.S. elections, when it is likely either Joe Biden will be reconfirmed in office and be in a stronger domestic position to negotiate with President Vladimir Putin, or Ukraine will be Donald Trump’s problem.

This strategy is a risky one. The bloody attritional “stalemate” on most fronts in the First World War—which several military analysts have compared to the Ukraine war over the past year—ended in all cases with the victory of one side, while the other collapsed owing to the scale of its losses, the exhaustion of its nation’s economy, or both.

In a war of attrition, the odds are on Russia’s side. After a brief wobble, Putin has reconsolidated his grip on power. According to our information, fundamental to his success has been that while many Russian elites did not want the war, they are now determined not to lose it. Plus, Russia has at least four times the population and fourteen times the GDP of Ukraine. Western sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy’s ability to sustain war.

In consequence, Russia has been able to greatly outcompete the West in the production of artillery shells, which are critical to attritional warfare and which Russia has been firing at more than three times the rate of the Ukrainians. It has also been able to buy huge quantities of ammunition from North Korea and drones from Iran. Western supplies of weaponry can only partly counterbalance this. Apart from anything else, the West cannot provide Ukraine with more troops to make up for Ukraine’s huge losses and difficulties in extending conscription.

Biden has spoken of helping to put the Ukrainians “in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table,” but all the evidence now suggests that they will in fact be in a weaker position the longer the war goes on.

Skeptics counter that if time is on Russia’s side, Russia has no incentive to agree to a compromise. But this view underestimates the gap between what Russia can accomplish on the battlefield and what it needs to ensure its broader national security. It is entirely true that Russia has no interest in freezing the existing situation, given that trends in the war suggest that if it continues fighting, it can accomplish more of its war aims, including capturing territories it claims but does not now hold. It will also continue fighting because, absent a Western pledge to end NATO expansion, the war is its only other means of blocking a Ukrainian alliance with the United States or NATO. But Russia cannot realistically hope to resubjugate the bulk of the Ukrainian people, which its invasion has permanently alienated. Nor can Russia secure itself against an expanding and rearming NATO without a massive military buildup that would badly wound its civilian economy. Without a settlement with the West, Russia’s overall security will be damaged even if it achieves victory over Ukraine on the battlefield.

Putin also has domestic incentives to engage the West. His position for now is secure, particularly after his successful suppression of the Wagner Group’s revolt last year and his reelection this spring. But Russia’s stumbles early in the war prompted doubts about his competence among Russian nationalists, and few within elite circles—­and especially the business elites—in Moscow and St. Petersburg are happy about the complete break in relations with the West produced by the invasion. There is a real chance that Putin could start to lose political clout if he neglects core domestic issues to pursue a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine. As it becomes more evident to the Russian people that they will not lose the war, their desire for a return to some form of normalcy is likely to grow, which will in turn create incentives for the Kremlin to engage with the West over a broader settlement.

As to whether Putin would be willing to compromise, the only way of finding this out is through talks—as even U.S. Establishment journalists have begun to recognize. The Russian government has stated its demands. What we need to explore is what they mean in practice and whether Moscow is prepared to moderate them.

The United States will have to make the first move toward talks and, given that time is on Russia’s side, will have to assure the Russians in advance that it is prepared to accept certain basic conditions—­especially Ukraine’s military neutrality­—in the context of a broader settlement.

Equally importantly, only the United States can propose and implement wider European security arrangements that could persuade Russia to moderate some of its specific ambitions in Ukraine. This is also in accordance with an old diplomatic maxim that if a particular issue is resistant to agreement, then the solution may be to broaden it in order to find other areas where compromise is possible.

Paradoxically, the most difficult issue of all, that of control of territory, is also in a way the easiest, since Ukraine cannot reconquer its lost territories militarily. In the spring of 2023—­before Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive—some Ukrainians were already prepared to say in private that if the offensive failed, Ukraine might have to accept the loss of these territories, if the alternative was years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties with no real prospect of victory. The failure of the counter­offensive can only have strengthened this view.

However, it also seems clear that no Ukrainian government would officially cede these territories to Russia. It seems highly improbable that a majority of Ukrainians would vote for such a referendum, and the backlash from heavily armed ultra­nationalist forces would be ferocious. The only answer therefore is the one pursued in Cyprus over the past half century: to leave the territorial issue for future negotiation, while both sides promise not to change the armistice line through force.

These guarantees would have to relate to the wider European security order and include guarantees for Ukrainian security. Russia’s most consistent demands in this area have been threefold: a legally binding guarantee that Ukraine will not enter NATO; that Ukraine place limits on its own armed forces; and that NATO draw back its forces from Eastern Europe to where they were in 1997, before the former Communist states in Eastern Europe were invited to join the coalition.

Agreeing to a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine would be a largely symbolic concession by the West. U.S. and NATO leaders have repeatedly stated that the alliance will not send troops to defend Ukraine. A month into the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated publicly that he was willing to declare neutrality, because prior to the Russian invasion he had asked the U.S. and other NATO governments to guarantee that within five years Ukraine would be a member, and they had all demurred. In these circumstances, to go on maintaining the possibility of NATO membership is simply a lie—and not worth the sacrifice of a single human life.

Concerning “demilitarization” and limits on NATO forces near Russia’s borders, any such agreement must include elements of reciprocity: verifiable limits on the number of Russian troops and missiles deployed in Kaliningrad, in Belarus, in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, and in the occupied areas of the country.

Short of NATO membership, what other security guarantees can the West give Ukraine to deter future Russian aggression? As in any international agreement, the search for absolute guarantees is pointless. The way forward is to create a settlement that Russia can live with, while making clear the price that Russia would pay for violating its terms: the resumption of massive Western arms transfers to Ukraine and the automatic reimposition of full economic sanctions on Russia.

That is why, as part of a settlement, existing Western sanctions should be suspended but not abolished. In addition, since Russia has been so heavily dependent on the goodwill of China and the Global South, it is very important that a peace settlement take place under the formal auspices of the United Nations, thereby increasing the diplomatic and economic costs of future Russian aggression.

Moscow has never articulated specifically what it means by the “denazification” of Ukraine, which it consistently cites as one of its war aims. If it means dictating the composition of future Ukrainian governments, this is obviously unacceptable. If, however, Russia is prepared to compromise on this issue, then there are two ways it could be reframed, and they are things Ukraine should be doing anyway—­and that the West should be demanding—­as part of Ukraine’s path to membership in the European Union.

The first is the adoption of some version of Germany’s laws banning neo-Nazi parties and insignia. This would not require Ukraine to eliminate forces like the Azov regiment—­something that would spark violence in Ukraine and could even start a civil war. It would, however, be a strong symbolic marker of Ukraine’s move away from the nationalism that has come to characterize official and public discourse in recent years, such as forbidding the use of the Russian language in education and culture, suppressing the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and banning opposition parties. These policies are all incompatible with Ukraine’s hopes of future membership in the European Union.

The second would be to repeal Ukrainian laws curtailing the linguistic and cultural rights of the Russian minority in Ukraine—laws that might violate E.U. rules on minority rights. In return, Russia would have to stop its Russification campaign in the occupied Ukrainian territories and provide Ukrainian-­language education opportunities for Russia’s huge ethnic Ukrainian population (an easy concession for Moscow, since the great majority speak Russian as a first language and are thoroughly assimilated).

Why might Putin agree to such a deal, apart from the fact that it would meet some key Russian demands? Firstly, because even if Russia can conquer much more of Ukraine, such victory will come at an extremely high cost. The three-month-long siege of Mariupol in 2022 culminated in a Russian victory, but it cost Russia heavy casualties and involved the almost complete destruction of the city. Dnipro has more than twice Mariupol’s population, and Kharkiv has more than three times. Russia would rule over fields of ruins inhabited by bitterly resentful populations.

Secondly, Russian public support for the war has been critically dependent on two beliefs, to which some statements by Western officials and commentators give credence: that the West is out to cripple Russia as a state, and that the only peace terms being offered by the West involve Russia’s acceptance of complete defeat. If, through a peace initiative, the West negated these perceptions, Russian public opinion could turn against sacrificing tens of thousands more Russian lives in a war no longer seen as defensive.

Absent a settlement, Moscow is headed toward a long-term confrontation with the West that leaves Russia more and more dependent on China and with less and less independent clout in the world. Russia now exports around half its oil to China alone. Russian trade with China reached $240 billion in 2023, while Russian exports to the European Union have fallen by more than 80 percent since the start of the war. Russia is now highly dependent on imports from China for the kind of technology that it used to get from Europe. This is something that the Russian elites have long feared and have embraced only because of what they have come to see as implacable Western hostility.

The same factors explain why Putin would not use a peace settlement in Ukraine as a prelude to attacking NATO—something that he has repeatedly and credibly declared that Russia has no intention of doing. Quite apart from the absence of any clear benefits, the Russian military limitations revealed by the Russia–­Ukraine War, and the apocalyptic risk of nuclear annihilation, the result would undoubtedly be a full-scale Western naval blockade that would severely limit Russian energy exports and deal the sort of crippling economic blow that Western sanctions have failed to achieve. Rather than a premeditated and unprovoked Russian attack, the real threat of a devastating direct war between Russia and NATO comes from mutual escalation following an accidental and unintended clash (for example, the shooting down of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, or a collision at sea), and the dangers of such a clash will only grow the longer the war continues.

As for the Ukrainians, General Valery Zaluzhny recognized after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive that Ukraine would have to go on the defensive, and Zelensky was forced to accept this reality. Sooner or later, Ukrainian commanders are likely to come to the conclusion that, given the stark and inescapable military realities they are facing, continuing the war risks catastrophic defeat.

In the balance of victory and defeat, a historian of Ukraine might also reflect that, while a settlement like this would be extremely painful, it would nonetheless represent a great Ukrainian achievement, as independence, security, and a Western path for 80 percent of Ukraine would reverse not only Putin’s ambitions when he started this war, but the past three hundred years of Russian domination of most of Ukraine. To be sure, this would be a qualified victory, but it is still vastly better than what Ukraine is likely to become if this war continues: a ruined, depopulated, and truncated rump state with severely reduced chances of ever achieving membership in the European Union. The Biden Administration has declared Ukrainian victory to be vital to Western security, but it has never defined what it means by victory. One thing, however, should be obvious: a qualified victory would be a great deal better than the outright defeat that we have good reason to fear if the war continues.

The biggest question of all is whether the United States can ride the coattails of history moving through Ukraine and achieve a stable balance of power in Europe and beyond. If we lack such foresight, we are very likely headed toward a world in which Ukraine becomes a dysfunctional wreck, a weak and divided West faces decades of nuclear tension with Russia, and Washington has bumbled its way into uniting China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea against us. Let us hope our leaders do not fail this test of statesmanship.

Russia Matters, 4/29/24

1. U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Russia remains in compliance with New START caps as of the end of 2023, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Mallory Stewart said in an interview with the Arms Control Association. “We understand that we can’t force them [Russians] into an arms control discussion, but what we can do is try to work with the rest of the multilateral and international community to make the case for pursuing risk reduction measures and building an increased appreciation for why it is in Russia’s interest to engage in arms control conversations,” Stewart said.

The Bell, 4/15/24

Airlines told to roll out the red carpet for Russian soldiers

Only a few weeks have passed since Russian President Vladimir Putin said those fighting in Ukraine were his country’s “new elite”, but already the privileges and special status being afforded to Russian soldiers who have served in Ukraine are racking up. Russia’s aviation agency last week advised airlines to give “participants in the special military operation” priority when checking in, passing through security and boarding flights. It also warned of consequences for anybody who showed an “inappropriate attitude” towards them — an apparent reference to asking airlines to be more lenient with soldiers that break the rules or disrupt other passengers. Speedy boarding is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits being rolled out for veterans of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it is emblematic of their new status in the country.

• Kommersant has reported on a leaked letter from the Rosaviatsia air transport regulator advising airlines how they should treat “participants in the Special Military Operation,” as Russian soldiers who fought Ukraine are officially known. Airlines were urged to grant them priority check-in and fast lines through airport security, while staff should be instructed to avoid “instances of inappropriate communication with military personnel.” Veterans should also be able to rebook tickets if they have a legitimate reason for missing a flight and those with mobility issues should be allocated the most comfortable seats.
• The timing of this advice is no coincidence. Since the turn of the year, there have been about a dozen high-profile scandals and clashes involving soldiers in airports and on planes. In one notorious incident in February, passengers on a flight from Moscow to Yakutsk persuaded police not to arrest a rowdy soldier. In another case, a veteran was kicked off a Pobeda flight for smoking, prompting the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastyrkin, to open a criminal case against the airline.
• Aviation officials are simply trying to protect themselves ahead of inevitable further confrontations, a senior manager at one of Russia’s leading airlines told The Bell. However, the instructions look like official advice to turn a blind eye to bad behavior from servicemen. Other businesses are wondering whether Rosaviatsia’s recommendations might become a template for regulators in other sectors. There are more and more reports of conflicts (especially in bars) involving soldiers just back from the front. And the patriotic segment of society is becoming increasingly vocal in its reaction to them. One coffee shop owner, for instance, was charged with discrediting the armed forces and has been placed under an extremism investigation after she asked a misbehaving soldier to leave the premises. 
• Russian veterans of the Ukraine offensive already enjoy a wide range of official benefits. Contract soldiers are exempt from prosecution for various crimes. Without exception, all participants of the war are entitled to free legal aid and bailiffs cannot seize their assets. They have recently been exempted from paying interest on consumer loans. In higher education, 10% of course places are offered for free to military personnel and their families, and there are scholarships for students who have served at the front. 

Why the world should care

Official benefits and legal exemptions for “participants in the special military operation” merely underline their special status in Russian society. Their elevation to this level — increasingly being placed above the rules and offered leniency where others would be punished — is not just about being recognised in Putin’s speeches. And it isn’t just about a few fringe perks. War veterans are also the biggest material winners from the great redistribution of wealth in Russia that began with the war.

AI-powered internet censorship

Russia’s internet watchdog wants to use artificial intelligence to block access to restricted information on the Russian internet. AI should help the agency block unwanted content three times faster — within an hour of publication — and strike down content more accurately, the authorities say.

• Russia’s Roskomnadzor communications regulator plans to start using AI this year to create and maintain a register of blocked sites, according to documents seen by Kommersant.
• The agency already uses its own information system to seek out and block access to online content that is prohibited in Russia. Tender documents issued by Roskomnadzor imply that in addition to tracking prohibited content, it has the ability to classify it according to its character (based on a neutral, negative or positive opinion of the author) and also to find copies and duplications of banned material and sites.
• In 2023 the system typically took three hours to identify unlawful content from the moment it was published. This year, the aim is to reduce that to two hours using AI and by the end of 2026 the average deletion time should be down to just 60 minutes. The agency is also targeting a drop in the error rate from 20% to 10%. AI should enable Roskomnadzor to block content both faster and more thoroughly, since it makes it possible to “identify complex contextual connections between text fragments, finding hidden patterns and associations,” the agency said in the documents obtained by Kommersant.
• The agency’s site-blocking operations are already partially automated. In March, it stopped updating a public register of forbidden sites, because Roskomnadzor no longer needs to notify telecom operators of what sites to block. Previously, operators were responsible for blocking content but now the agency can do it directly thanks to technological and equipment upgrades.

Why the world should care

The first thing that comes to mind when hearing about plans to use AI to censor the internet is that this is a blatant waste of taxpayers’ money on technology that the authorities cannot begin to understand. But in recent years the internet watchdog has sharpened its teeth. In 2018, Roskomnadzor’s failed attempt to block Telegram prompted ridicule and amusement across the internet. Since then, though, a new management team has begun to introduce more effective means of blocking sites, achieving results in some areas comparable to the Great Firewall of China.

By Chas Freeman, Website, 4/11/24

Remarks to the Massachusetts Peace Action Campaign

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute, Brown University
By video, 11 April 2024

It has been a while since the United States won a war.  It looks as though we are about to lose yet another one – the war in Ukraine.  This is a proxy war justified as an effort to “weaken and isolate” Russia.  Our strategic defeat in this effort now leaves us with three unpalatable alternatives.  We can continue to support Ukraine as Russia grinds it to bits and reduces it further in size and population.  We can escalate the war, as French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated, despite the Russian threat to answer us with counter-escalation, possibly to the nuclear level.  Or we can face up to failure and save what we can of Ukraine by negotiating with Russia.  I know which of these choices I would prefer, and I suspect you do too.  And, however this unwise and unnecessary war ends, we need to ensure that there are no more like it in future.

They say that a mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.  Our country has recently made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policies.  Sadly, we don’t seem to be learning much of anything from this experience.  We have instead invented something uniquely American called a “forever war.”  Such wars routinely fail.  Still, we keep launching them.

I want to speak to you this evening about why we do this, why we shouldn’t, and how we can stop doing it.  My focus will be the forever war with Russia in Ukraine.

Forever wars can take many forms.  They can be economic or technological, like the one the Trump administration kicked off against China and that the Biden administration has enthusiastically doubled down on.  They can be military, like our twenty-three year “global war on terrorism.”  That has taken us into combat in over eighty countries, killed over 900,000 people, and cost us an estimated $8 trillion.  Forever wars need not be direct, as our proxy war in Ukraine illustrates.  They can even be covert, as our multiple barely concealed interventions in Syria demonstrate.

What America’s forever wars have in common is that they involve:

• muddled, open-ended objectives,
• movable goal posts,
• an intensely propagandized narrative to mobilize support for them,
• no quarter for those who challenge that narrative,
• no benchmarks for judging success or failure,
• no limits on the level of resources we must feed into them,
• no defined end state that would justify ending them,
• no strategy for their termination, and
• no vision of a feasible order if and when they end.

Sunzi argued that wars should implement strategies that achieve specific national objectives with the least destruction.  Carl von Clausewitz described war as the expedient continuation of politics by other means.  William Tecumseh Sherman said that the purpose of war was to produce a better peace.  Fred Iklé said every war must end.

But what if domestic political dysfunction prevents the definition of specific national objectives?  What if a country’s political culture dictates that the only effective way to impose its druthers on other countries is coercively, through warfare – economic or military?   What if such a country measures the success of punitive measures not by the extent to which they achieve desirable changes in foreign behavior but by the pain they inflict on foreigners?  What if such a country believes it can resort to the use of force with impunity whenever it judges that  less violent methods of bending foreigners to its will are less likely to do so?  What if that country’s wars routinely lead not to peace but to turmoil or anarchy?

Our “forever wars” are the product of applying hubris to two related national ambitions vis-à-vis the world beyond our borders: (1) the consolidation of a global American sphere of influence and (2) the foreign regime changes needed to realize this.  The Ukraine war exemplifies both elements of this hegemonic behavior.  It has been accompanied by wall-to-wall propaganda that confuses self-righteousness with truth, demonizes our adversary, and replaces analysis with wishful thinking and denial, leaving nothing certain and everything plausible.  As always, the most destructive lies are those we tell ourselves.

The Ukraine war is not – as is claimed – about democracy vs. authoritarianism.  It is about delineating the post-Cold War U.S. sphere of influence in Europe.

Our country invented the modern sphere of influence.  In the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to it, we asserted a right to limit the freedom of maneuver of the countries of the Western Hemisphere and to demand their deference to our political and economic interests.  After World War II, Americans expanded our sphere of influence to include Western Europe and Northeast Asia.  In the post-Cold War period, Washington adapted the hegemonic principles of the Monroe Doctrine to the unipolar moment and extended our sphere of influence to the entire world beyond the borders of Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.  In the end, the only countries bordering Russia other than those of Central Asia not in our sphere of influence were Georgia and Ukraine.  American neoconservatives saw these neighbors of Russia as vacuums to be filled by U.S. military power.

During the Cold War, NATO was a purely defensive alliance that effectively protected Western Europe from a predatory Soviet Union and its restive satellites.  But twenty-five years ago, at the end of the 20^th century, after the USSR had disappeared, NATO began to launch offensive operations – first against Serbia, then in Afghanistan, later in Libya.  And as NATO expanded toward Russia’s borders, American troops and weapons aimed at Russia routinely established a presence on the territory of its new members.

At the 2007 Munich security conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin bluntly warned the United States and its European allies that his country would feel obliged to act if NATO – the instrument by which the U.S. has long exercised dominant politico-military influence in Europe – were further expanded.  His warning echoed that of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin as early as 1994.

In 2008 as in 1994, Washington ignored these warnings and persuaded NATO to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, both of which border the Russian Federation.  As the Russians habitually say, it was no accident that shortly thereafter, war broke out between Georgia and Russia.  This was in part due to Georgia’s exuberant reaction to apparent open-ended American support for its nationalist ambitions.  More to the point, it was a calculated Russian signal of resolve to resist encirclement by the United States and NATO.  We dismissed the signal and portrayed Moscow’s defeat of Georgian adventurism as wanton Russian aggression that vindicated our determination to bring Russia’s neighbors into NATO.  Someone summed this up by declaring that the reason NATO still exists is to handle the problems that NATO’s continuing existence creates.

Coincident with the war in Georgia, the United States and NATO escalated the effort to re-equip, restructure, and retrain the Ukrainian armed forces to be ready for combat with Russia.  In 2014, Washington helped engineer a coup in Kyiv that overthrew the elected government and installed handpicked pro-American, anti-Russian successors in its place.  The new ultranationalist Ukrainian government then banned the use of Russian and other minority languages in education or for official business.  But almost thirty percent of Ukrainians are native speakers of Russian.  Russian-speaking secessionists in the Donbas region resisted forced assimilation and began a civil war with Ukrainian ultranationalists.  This soon became a proxy war between Russia and the West.

The United States reaffirmed its intention to bring Ukraine into NATO and stepped up our aid to the Ukrainian armed forces.  But if Ukraine entered NATO while Crimea was still part of it, the 250-year-old Russian naval base at Sevastopol would fall under the control of the U.S. and NATO.  In large measure to preempt this, Russia annexed Crimea.  It was able to do so without violence because Crimeans had made it clear on several previous occasions that they did not want to be part of Ukraine.  In 2014, a Russian-organized referendum revealed that the views of most Crimeans had not changed.  If they could not be independent, they preferred to be part of Russia.  It is utterly unrealistic to expect them ever to agree to place themselves again under Ukrainian sovereignty.

By 2021, with our help, Ukraine had acquired a NATO-trained and equipped army larger than the armed forces of Britain, France, and Germany combined.  Not surprisingly, Moscow viewed this huge hostile force on its western borders as a serious national security threat.  Recent attacks deep into Russia by Ukrainian forces have inadvertently validated Russia’s concerns about the consequences of Ukraine joining an alliance hostile to it.  Just as Soviet forces stationed in Cuba in 1962 menaced Washington, U.S. forces stationed in Ukraine could reduce the warning time of a strike on Moscow to about five minutes.

So, in December 2021, Moscow massed troops on the Russian border with Ukraine and demanded negotiations to resolve its security concerns.  It insisted on Ukrainian neutrality, respect for the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine, and a discussion of a new European security architecture that would threaten neither Russia nor the members of NATO.  The U.S. and NATO responded by rejecting negotiations while warning – in an instance of self-fulfilling paranoia – that Russia planned to invade Ukraine.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, put it this way: “President Putin … sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement.  That … was a pre-condition for [Russia] not invad[ing] Ukraine.  Of course we didn’t sign that.”  In fact, the U.S. and NATO refused to discuss it at all, leaving Russia with the choice of either accepting NATO membership for Ukraine and the eventual deployment of U.S. forces there or using force to prevent this.  This unwelcome choice was the proximate cause of Moscow’s fateful decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal under international law, but to say that it was “unprovoked” defies credibility.

Could a negotiation with Russia have prevented war?  We have at least two solid pieces of evidence to suggest that it might have.  Despite Moscow’s sympathy and support for the Russian-speaking secessionists in the Donbas, it agreed in the Minsk accords of 2014 and ’15 that their region should remain part of Ukraine, provided their linguistic autonomy was guaranteed. (The Minsk accords were subsequently repudiated, not by Russia but by Ukraine, France, and Germany.)

Then, too, six weeks after it invaded Ukraine, Moscow agreed to a draft treaty with Kyiv by which it would withdraw from Ukraine in return for Ukraine renouncing NATO membership and proclaiming neutrality.  This treaty was to have been signed on April 15, 2022, but the U.S., U.K, and NATO objected to it.  In early April Ukraine repudiated its earlier agreement to the terms of the treaty.

As the war has ground on, Russia has repeatedly reiterated its willingness to talk, and the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine have consistently rejected doing so.  The refusal to discuss a formula for peaceful coexistence between Ukraine and Russia, between NATO and Russia, and between Ukrainian and Russian-speaking Ukrainians has had grave consequences, most of all for Ukraine.

The war has not only imposed huge costs on Ukraine but also greatly weakened its bargaining power in any future negotiation with Russia.  If there is an agreed end to this war, it will be on largely Russian terms and vastly less favorable to Ukraine than the peace the U.S. and NATO persuaded Kyiv to reject in April 2022.  Ukraine, the U.S., and NATO are now in the final stages of a humiliating strategic defeat.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the population of Ukraine was about 32 million.  Since then, it has fallen to about 20 million.

One-third of Ukraine’s people have been dislocated.  Over 2 million have fled to Russia and 6 to 8 million to the West and elsewhere.  The number of Ukrainian casualties is a closely guarded secret, but indications are that it may be around half a million.  Ukraine’s industrial base and infrastructure have been devastated.  As the war began, Ukraine was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe.  Now it is even poorer and more corrupt.

The Biden administration has regularly described the proxy war with Russia as designed to “isolate and weaken Russia” and pledged to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”  Prominent American politicians have extolled the benefits of having Ukrainians rather than Americans fight Russians.  Ukrainians have done so with remarkable bravery.  But so many have died that Ukraine can no longer mount an adequate defense, let alone go on the offensive.

The war has devastated Ukraine without either isolating or weakening Russia.  It has cut Europe off from Russian energy supplies and reoriented Russia toward China, India, Iran, the West Asian Arab countries, and Africa.  Russia’s economy has grown, not contracted.  Moscow’s defense budget has doubled, and its armaments production is now three times that of the US and NATO combined.  Like Ukrainian casualties, those of Russia are hard to estimate.  But with a population four to five times larger than Ukraine’s, Russia can sustain many more casualties than Ukraine can.

The U.S. and NATO expected an easy victory over Russia.  But both now face a humiliating military defeat.  The war has greatly weakened Ukraine’s bargaining position in any future negotiation with Russia.  Germany now feels sufficiently threatened for it have begun a debate on whether to acquire nuclear weapons.

As a result of U.S. sanctions and the sabotage of Russia’s undersea gas pipeline to Germany, Europe has lost its access to cheap Russian energy supplies.  These have been replaced by imports from the United States that are as much as four times as expensive.  European energy-intensive industries are no longer internationally competitive.  Germany, Europe’s core economy, is being deindustrialized.  Current trends are raising disturbing questions about the future of the EU.

The Ukraine war, combined with other bellicose actions, has cost the United States and the West the moral argument internationally.  We cannot have it both ways – condemning Russia’s illegal actions in Ukraine while actively supporting Israel’s even more lawless and lethal actions in Palestine.  The West has inadvertently put its hypocrisy and double standards on dramatic display.

We are told by our leaders and their political straphangers that Ukraine and other current and potential “forever wars” are about defending democratic values.  But as we build a domestic national security state to support our wars, we are sacrificing ever more of the civil liberties and respect for due process and the rule of law that are central to constitutional democracy.  As Benjamin Franklin wisely pointed out, a nation prepared to trade its freedoms for its security puts both in jeopardy.  And, in this case, it is not even our security that is at stake but that of others.  The “domino theory” was nonsense in Southeast Asia.  It is equally fallacious in Eastern Europe.  Our wars are wars of choice, not necessity, and have little or no direct connection to Americans’ security and wellbeing.

It is said that U.S. credibility with allies and adversaries is at stake in Ukraine.  But our policies and actions there have not bolstered confidence in American steadfastness so much as shaken confidence in our judgment and cast doubt on the efficacy of our military doctrines and weaponry.  The West now suffers from “forever war” fatigue.  American and European taxpayers are becoming reluctant to keep sending money to a cause that they increasingly perceive as both futile and corrupt.  And we are being reminded that, as the 20^th century demonstrated, there can be no peace in Europe based on ostracizing Russia or any other European great power.

As the war proceeds, Russia’s bargaining position continues to strengthen.  If there is ever an end to this war, it will be on terms far less favorable to Ukraine than the peace the U.S. and NATO persuaded it to reject in April 2022.  Meanwhile, inept American diplomacy continues to push Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea together in a loose anti-American entente and to increase the danger of one or more nuclear wars.

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”  This is an unequivocal commitment to defend any and all NATO members against attack.  But the United States and other NATO members have already demonstrated that we are not in fact prepared to respond directly to an armed attack on Ukraine by Russia.  In response to just such an attack, we have resorted to evasions and a proxy war pitting Ukrainians – but not us – against the aggressor.

If Ukraine were a member of NATO, Article 5 would require the president to ask Congress to declare war on the world’s most formidable nuclear power.  Vladimir Putin has threatened to conduct such a war at the nuclear level.  He may not be the demonic figure our propaganda makes him out to be.  But bravado aside, calling his bluff is an insane risk for us to take for ourselves, our allies, and the world at large.

As in other “forever wars,” we have inhaled our own propaganda about Ukraine.  Our quixotic attempt to exploit Ukrainian nationalism to “weaken and isolate” Russia or engineer regime change in Moscow has been a catastrophe for Ukrainians and a strategic defeat for the West.  It has brought the U.S. and NATO to the point at which we must either enter the fray directly, watch Russia grind Ukraine to bits, or accept a negotiated outcome that addresses Russian interests and objectives.

Moscow has described those interests and stated those objectives clearly and consistently.  They do not include invading NATO territory.  Claiming that they do is threat mongering designed to mobilize popular support in the West for our proxy war in Ukraine, to boost U.S. and NATO defense budgets, and to fatten the profits of the military-industrial complex.  Moscow has conducted a limited war – a so-called “special military operation” – in Ukraine.  It has not marshalled the forces necessary to subdue, occupy, or annex all of Ukraine.  Russia’s battlefield performance has not demonstrated any capacity to invade the West, and Moscow has expressed no ambition to do so.

It is time to stop attributing objectives to Russia that it has not stated and does not have.  Moscow’s professed aims have been and remain: (1) to restore the neutrality of Ukraine and prevent the deployment of U.S. and other NATO forces and installations to Ukraine; (2) to restore and ensure the linguistic and other rights of Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority; and (3) to negotiate a new European security architecture that can alleviate the threat Russia and other European states pose to each other by crafting a durable peace between them.

In the absence of diplomacy, the use of force has once again failed.  Far from weakening Russia, the Ukraine war has strengthened it.  Far from isolating Russia, the Ukraine war has forced it into the embrace of China and Iran and boosted its ties with India, the Arab world, and Africa.  Ukraine’s economy has been eviscerated, its population reduced, its military capacity gutted, and its territory diminished.  If the war is allowed to continue, this will only wreak more havoc in Ukraine, kill more Ukrainians as well as Russians, and further shrink Ukraine’s territory, possibly leaving it landlocked.

The proponents of our militarized foreign policy asked us once again to give war a chance.  We foolishly did.  This has now left us with no alternative to trying diplomacy.  We cannot hope to regain at the negotiating table what we have lost on the battlefield, but we must now strive to compose a peace with Russia that enables Ukraine to be both a buffer and a bridge between Russia and the rest of Europe.  That – not NATO membership – is the prerequisite for the emergence of a prosperous and democratic Ukraine, untainted by corruption.  And that – not NATO membership for Ukraine – is the prerequisite for peace and stability in Europe.