By Chris Hedges, Scheerpost, 1/30/23

Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern.

The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia.

If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. That will ignite World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.

U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery:

Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package.

These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

Since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe. 

The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance.

It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries.

It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.

I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance.

As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.

War as a Laboratory

NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers.

The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.

The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal.

The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six-to-eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal.

Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.

Another ‘Surge’

U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks on a mission during Desert Storm in February 1991. A Bradley IFV and logistics convoy in background. (W. Homes, II, U.S. Navy, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.

Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition.

Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen  around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts.

Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance.

Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.50 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zero temperatures, the Ukrainian president says.

According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war as of last November.  

“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Sen. Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”

Palpable Rot of Empire

No Man’s Land between Russian and Ukrainin forces during the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire.

America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government.

Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism. 

Pumping Money into the War Machine

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion U.S. spending bill by Congress included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them.

In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war:

“[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine.

This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures. 

Earlier this month, the U.S. House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.”

The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.”

The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy.

The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

America’s two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide. 

“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”

Trying to Recoup Lost Glory

Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.”

During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire.

The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its own army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state. Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state.

In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder.

The  British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.

“Often irrational, even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way,” he wrote. 

The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East.

It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs.

As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States.

Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself. 

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

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Note: The Global Times is considered as reflecting official Chinese government views. – Natylie

By Yang Sheng and Wan Hengyi, Global Times (China), February 12, 2023

Before the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s outbreak, Moscow sent a message for talks based on the “existing reality” and without “preconditions,” while US President Joe Biden is also scheduled to visit Poland to show Washington’s unwavering support for Kiev to continue the fight.

Chinese analysts believed that hopes for peace are low, and if Moscow’s call for talks is ignored, the conflict will undoubtedly escalate.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said in an interview with Zvezda television that “Yes, according to the classics, any hostilities end up in talks, and, naturally, as we have said before, we will be ready for such talks, but only if those are talks with no preconditions, talks that would be based on the existing reality,” TASS reported on Saturday.

However, it is not Kiev, but Washington and Brussels who make the decision on talks with Moscow, Vershinin said.

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Sunday that “the multiple rounds of Russia-Ukraine talks in the last year that reached no meaningful result have proven that even if Moscow and Kiev reach some agreements, Washington will immediately get involved and ruin the entire process. So the key at the moment is not about whether talks could happen between Russia and Ukraine again, but whether Washington and Moscow can reach at least some tacit consensus to avoid an escalation.”

Chinese analysts said that the US is not ready or willing for talks with Russia at this moment. Based on the latest arrangements and decisions made by the US, the Biden administration is going to keep the conflict from ending and will keep using it to undermine Russia and the EU, and Ukraine is the price that Washington is willing to pay which Moscow understands clearly.

Song said if Russia’s call for talks is ignored by the US, then Moscow will be more determined to seek a breakthrough via military measures. This is likely to happen in the coming weeks or even coming days, as Russian troops need to launch a new offensive before the West’s new military assistance to Ukraine is fully delivered.

If Russia realizes full control in the eastern region of Ukraine, Moscow would be able to declare a halt to “special military operation,” and then a new basis for talks would be created. Western countries will need to reconsider how to deal with the situation with a more pragmatic attitude, and the divergence between the pro-peace European countries and the pro-war US could emerge again, said analysts.

But the problem is that before there is hope for more peace talks, military conflicts and casualties would be unavoidable, they said.

“Russia’s call is more like a political expression to show that Moscow is open to negotiations rather than merely seeking a military solution, but this is not a realistic idea that would receive a positive response from the US at the moment,” Cui Heng, an assistant research fellow from the Center for Russian Studies of East China Normal University, told the Global Times on Sunday.

According to CNN on Friday, Biden will visit Poland this month to mark the one-year anniversary of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, “returning to the region as the war enters a volatile new phase without a clear path to peace.”

“The main purpose of Biden’s trip to Europe at this time is to build momentum for his election next year. In addition, he also wants to suppress the pragmatic voices of peace in Europe and further put pressure on European leaders to jointly target Russia with a firmer hawkish stance, making a de-escalation of the conflict far from imminent,” Cui noted.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, 1/29/23

As unbelievable as it might sound, the invasion under which millions of Ukrainians are suffering right now will likely not be the end of their hardship. That’s because of the hand-rubbing that’s been happening the past few months over the potential business bonanza to be found in the country’s postwar reconstruction.

In November last year, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky signed a memorandum of understanding with BlackRock that will see the firm’s Financial Markets Advisory (FMA) — a special consulting unit set up after the 2008 crash to work with crisis-stricken governments — advise Ukraine’s economic ministry on designing a road map for rebuilding the war-torn country. In BlackRock’s words, the agreement has the “goal of creating opportunities for both public and private investors to participate in the future reconstruction and recovery of the Ukrainian economy.”

Ukrainian officials have been more blunt, with the ministry’s press release saying it would “primarily attract private capital.” The agreement formalizes a set of September 2022 talks between Zelensky and BlackRock chair and CEO Larry Fink, in which the president stressed that Ukraine must “be an attractive country for investors” and that it was “important to me that a structure like this be successful for all parties involved.” According to a release from the president’s office, BlackRock had already been advising the Ukrainian government “for several months” by the end of 2022. The two had agreed to focus on “coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants” in Ukrainian reconstruction, and “channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.”

The history of BlackRock FMA makes all of this particularly foreboding. According to an Investigate Europe dive into its activities in Europe, BlackRock is “an adviser to states on privatization” and “is very busy countering any attempt to increase regulation” in Europe. The firm used the 2008 financial crash — built on the risky mortgage securities Fink himself had pioneered — to increase its power and sway among political decision-makers, leaving a trail of conflicts of interest and revolving-door influence-peddling in its wake. In the United States, it’s been particularly controversial for running the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era bond-buying program, nearly half of which ended up making purchases in BlackRock’s own funds.

Ukraine is already opening up for investment. In December last year, as Kiev and BlackRock were months into their discussions, the Ukrainian parliament rammed through property developer–backed legislation that had stalled prior to the war, deregulating urban planning laws to the benefit of a private sector that has been hungrily eyeing the demolition of historic sites. It comes on top of parliament’s earlier assault on the country’s Soviet-era labor laws, legalizing zero-hour contracts, weakening the power of unions, and stripping labor protections from 70 percent of its workforce. That particular change was advised not by BlackRock, but the British foreign office under Boris Johnson, and pushed by Zelensky’s party, which charged that the “extreme over-regulation of employment contradicts the principles of market self-regulation” and “creates bureaucratic barriers . . . for the self-realization of employees.”

“Steps towards deregulation and the simplification of the tax system are examples of measures which not only withstood the blow of the war but have been accelerated by it,” the Economist gushed in its 2022 Reform Tracker for the country. “With both domestic and international audiences committed to Ukraine’s recovery and development,” reforms were likely to accelerate after the war, it hoped, anticipating added deregulation, further “opening the path for international capital to flow into Ukrainian agriculture.” The recipe for success, it counseled, required more privatization of “loss-making state-owned enterprises,” which will “depress government expenditure.” This last goal of privatization, the Economist bitterly noted, had “stalled as the war broke out.”

Yet the Economist needn’t have worried, because this was one of the top priorities for postwar Ukraine, as mandated by the European backers currently propping up the country’s economy and pledging to rebuild it. This past July saw a host of big business, European, and Ukrainian representatives attend the Ukraine Recovery Conference, 2022’s version of the annual Ukraine Reform Conference, which had measured the country’s progress on the neoliberal pathway its post-2014 integration with the West demanded.

As the conference’s policy brief on economic recovery made clear, a postwar Ukrainian state won’t need BlackRock around to pursue the kind of agenda a Republican politician dreams of. Among the policy recommendations are a “decrease in government spending,” “tax system efficiency,” and “deregulation.” It advises further “reducing the size of government” through privatization and other reforms, liberalizing capital markets, and ensuring “investment freedom” — a euphemism for opening up markets — thereby creating a “better and more familiar investment climate for EU and global direct investment.”

The vision discussed by attendees is something straight out of Pete Buttigieg’s wildest fantasies: the country as start-up, one that’s digitized, business-friendly, and green, albeit with nine nuclear reactors built and supplied by the US-based Westinghouse. It’s a model that ramps up Zelensky’s own “country in a smartphone” vision he put forward three years ago.

This is a familiar story when it comes to crisis-riven nations that come to rely on the financial aid of Western governments and institutions, who often find that the funds they desperately need come with some unsavory strings attached. These come in the form of mandatory reforms that dismantle state involvement in the economy and open up the country’s markets to foreign capital, adding to its people’s impoverishment and suffering. This was happening in Ukraine long before the invasion, with the International Monetary Fund and Western officials like then US vice president Joe Biden pressuring the government to carry out reforms like cutting gas subsidies to Ukrainian households, privatizing thousands of state-owned companies, and lifting the long-standing moratorium on selling farmland. Zelensky saw this last item through under pandemic-driven financial pressures.

Ukrainians’ freedom to determine their own fate has been under assault from Moscow’s colonial-style land grab. Unfortunately, it looks likely that an end to the war will bring new assaults from the other direction as the West’s army of investors readies its invasion.

RT.com, 2/9/23

So, literally all the players to the Minsk Agreements have admitted they were viewing them as a ruse, except for the Russians. – Natylie

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky personally refused to implement the Minsk agreements – a roadmap for peace in the east of the country, which was co-sponsored by Germany and France.

He made the admission during an interview with Der Spiegel published on Thursday as he continues his tour across Europe.

Zelensky said he viewed the agreements as a “concession” on Ukraine’s part, and never once actually sought to implement them. Instead, they were merely used to exchange prisoners with the two breakaway Donbass republics.

The president claimed he openly told that to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Russian President Vladimir Putin back in 2019, with all of them acting “surprised.”

“But as for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: ‘We cannot implement it like this,’” Zelensky stated. “I told [Putin] the same as the other two. They were surprised and said: ‘If we had known beforehand that you would change the meaning of our meeting, then there would have been problems even before the summit.’”

The Minsk agreements, originally brokered in 2014 and further expanded in 2015, envisioned a roadmap for reconciliation between Ukraine and the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The two regions rebelled against the country’s new authorities in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, which ousted democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich.

Ukraine’s failure to implement the agreement, which would have seen the breakaway territories reintegrated with the country but retain a special status, ultimately led to the ongoing conflict.

Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, multiple politicians have taken credit for the failure of the Minsk agreements, admitting they were merely a ruse to give Ukraine time to build up its military. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko was the first to admit last year that Kiev never intended to abide by them and used the deal to “create powerful armed forces.”

Merkel and another original signatory of the Minsk agreements, former French president Francois Hollande, have also since confirmed that this was actually the true goal of the deal.

Moscow considers these admissions to be evidence that the negotiations were conducted in bad faith and that the Ukrainian government and its backers had always intended for the Minsk agreements to flop and for the Donbass crisis to be resolved by force. Russia claims that its military campaign in Ukraine, launched last February, preempted an offensive planned by Kiev with NATO’s help. Ukraine, Germany, and France “lied to the people of Donbass, as they had a terrible fate planned for them, which Russia prevented,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said back in January.

“Germany, France and Ukraine were playing a swindle game with the Minsk agreements. Now is payback time,” he stated at the time.

Middle East Eye, 1/30/23

Iran and Russia have linked their banking systems, a senior Iranian official said on Monday, a move that will allow the two heavily sanctioned countries with deepening economic ties to trade and conduct business outside the US financial system.

The two connected their interbank communication and transfer systems. Since the 2018 reimposition of sanctions, Iran has been disconnected from the western-based Swift financial messaging system, while many Russian banks were kicked off the platform following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Iranian banks no longer need to use SWIFT … with Russian banks, which can be for the opening of Letters of Credit and transfers or warranties,” deputy governor of Iran’s Central Bank, Mohsen Karimi, told the semi-official Fars news agency.

Swift is a Belgium-based financial messaging platform that allows trillions of dollars’ worth of money to cross borders daily and be transferred into bank accounts. It’s also used for foreign exchange settlement and trade. US banks often act as intermediaries in the transactions.

The decision to create an alternative payment system is the latest sign that Iran and Russia are moving beyond a marriage of convenience in hotspots like Syria, to a more comprehensive partnership against the West…

Read full article here.