by Gary
Leupp
It seems so
strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be
living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist)
Russia.
The Russian
president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they
never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a
corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political
opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the
restoration of the USSR.
(The latter
claim rests largely on Vladimir Putin’s comment that the
dissolution of the Soviet Union was a “catastrophe” and
“tragedy”—which in many respects it was. The press chooses to
ignore his comment that “Anyone who does not miss the Soviet
Union has no heart, while anyone who wants to restore it has no
brain.” It conflicts with the simple talking-point that Putin
misses the imperial Russia of the tsars if not the commissars and,
burning with resentment over the west’s triumph in the Cold War,
plans to exact revenge through wars of aggression and territorial
expansion.)
The U.S.
media following its State Department script depicts Russia as an
expansionist power. That it can do so, so successfully, such that
even rather progressive people—such as those appalled by Trump’s
victory who feel inclined to blame it on an external force—believe
it, is testimony to the lingering power and utility of the Cold War
mindset.
The military
brass keep reminding us: We are up against an existential threat! One
wants to say that this—obviously—makes no sense! Russia is twice
the size of the U.S. with half its population. Its foreign bases can
be counted on two hands. The U.S. has 800 or so bases abroad.
Russia’s
military budget is 14% of the U.S. figure. It does not claim to be
the exceptional nation appointed by God to preserve “security” on
its terms anywhere on the globe. Since the dissolution of the USSR in
1991, the U.S. has waged war (sometimes creating new client-states)
in Bosnia (1994-5), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ), Iraq (2003-
), Libya (2011), and Syria (2014- ), while raining down drone strikes
from Pakistan to Yemen to North Africa. These wars-based-on-lies have
produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, millions of
refugees, and general ongoing catastrophe throughout the “Greater
Middle East.” There is no understating their evil.
The U.S.
heads an expanding military alliance formed in 1949 to confront the
Soviet Union and global communism in general. Its raison d’être
has been dead for many years. Yet it has expanded from 16 to 28
members since 1999, and new members Estonia and Latvia share borders
with Russia.
(Imagine the
Warsaw Pact expanding to include Mexico. But no, the Warsaw Pact of
the USSR and six European allies was dissolved 26 years ago in the
idealistic expectation that NATO would follow in a new era of
cooperation and peace.)
And this
NATO alliance, in theory designed to defend the North Atlantic, was
only first deployed after the long (and peaceful) first Cold War, in
what had been neutral Yugoslavia (never a member of either the Warsaw
Pact nor NATO), Afghanistan (over 3000 miles from the North
Atlantic), and the North African country of Libya. Last summer NATO
held its most massive military drills since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, involving 31,000 troops in Poland, rehearsing war with
Russia. (The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier actually
criticized this exercise as “warmongering.”)
Alliance
officials expressed outrage when Russia responded to the warmongering
by placing a new S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable
Iskander systems on its territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and
Lithuania on the Baltic coast. But Russia has in fact been
comparatively passive in a military sense during this period.
In 1999, as
NATO was about to occupy the Serbian province of Kosovo (soon to be
proclaimed an independent country, in violation of international
law), nearby Russian peacekeepers raced to the airport in Pristina,
Kosovo, to secure it an ensure a Russian role in the Serbian
province’s future. It was a bold move that could have provoked a
NATO-Russian clash. But the British officer on the ground wisely
refused an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to block the Russian move,
declaring he would not start World War III for Gen. Clark.
This,
recall, was after Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine
Albright (remember, the Hillary shill who said there’s a special
place in hell reserved for women who don’t vote for women)
presented to the Russian and Serbian negotiators at Rambouillet a
plan for NATO occupation of not just Kosovo but all Serbia. It was a
ridiculous demand, rejected by the Serbs and Russians, but depicted
by unofficial State Department spokesperson and warmonger Christiane
Amanpour as the “will of the international community.” As
though Russia was not a member of the international community!
This
Pristina airport operation was largely a symbolic challenge to U.S.
hegemony over the former Yugoslavia, a statement of protest that
should have been taken seriously at the time.
In any case,
the new Russian leader Putin was gracious after the 9/11 attacks in
2001, even offering NATO a military transport corridor through
Russia to Afghanistan (closed in 2015). He was thanked by George W.
Bush with the expansion of NATO by seven more members in 2004. (The
U.S. press made light of this extraordinary geopolitical development;
it saw and continues to see the expansion of NATO as no more
problematic than the expansion of the UN or the European Union.) Then
in April 2008 NATO announced that Georgia would be among the next
members accepted into the alliance.
Soon the
crazy Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, emboldened by the
promise of near-term membership, provoked a war with the breakaway
republic of South Ossetia, which had never accepted inclusion of the
new Georgian state established upon the dissolution of the Georgian
Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. The Ossetians, fearing resurgent
Georgian nationalism, had sought union with the Russian Federation.
So had the people of Abkhazia.
The two
“frozen conflicts,” between the Georgian state and these peoples,
had been frozen due to the deployment of Russian and Georgian
peacekeepers. Russia had not recognized these regions as independent
states nor agreed to their inclusion in the Russian Federation. But
when Russian soldiers died in the Georgian attack ion August, Russia
responded with a brief punishing invasion. It then recognized of the
two new states (six months after the U.S. recognized Kosovo).
(Saakashvili,
in case you’re interested, was voted out of power, disgraced,
accused of economic crimes, and deprived of his Georgian citizenship.
After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University—of which I as a Tufts faculty member
feel deeply ashamed—he was appointed as governor of Odessa in
Ukraine by the pro-NATO regime empowered by the U.S.-backed coup of
February 22, 2014.)
Sen. John
McCain proclaimed in 2008: “We are all Georgians now,” and
advocated U.S. military aid to the Georgian regime. An advocate of
war as a rule, McCain then became a big proponent of regime change in
Ukraine to allow for that country’s entry into NATO. Neocons in the
State Department including most importantly McCain buddy Victoria
Nuland, boasted of spending $ 5 billion in support of “the
Ukrainian people’s European aspirations” (meaning: the desire of
many Ukrainians in the western part of the country to join the
European Union—risking, although they perhaps do not realize it, a
reduction in their standard of living under a Greek-style austerity
program—to be followed by NATO membership, tightening the military
noose around Russia).
The
Ukrainian president opted out in favor of a generous Russian aid
package. That decision—to deny these “European aspirations”—was
used to justify the coup.
But look at
it from a Russian point of view. Just look at this map
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/NATO_affiliations_in_Europe.svg),
of the expanding NATO alliance, and imagine it spreading to include
that vast country (the largest in Europe, actually) between Russia to
the east and Poland to the west, bordering the Black Sea to the
south. The NATO countries at present are shown in dark blue, Ukraine
and Georgia in green. Imagine those countries’ inclusion.
And imagine
NATO demanding that Russia vacate its Sevastopol naval facilities,
which have been Russian since 1783, turning them over to the (to
repeat: anti-Russian) alliance. How can anyone understand the
situation in Ukraine without grasping this basic history?
The Russians
denounced the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych
(democratically elected—if it matters—in 2010), which was abetted
by neo-fascists and marked from the outset by an ugly Russophobic
character encouraged by the U.S. State Department. The majority
population in the east of the country, inhabited by Russian-speaking
ethnic Russians and not even part of Ukraine until 1917, also
denounced the coup and refused to accept the unconstitutional regime
that assumed power after Feb. 22.
When such
people rejected the new government, and declared their autonomy, the
Ukrainian army was sent in to repress them but failed,
embarrassingly, when the troops confronted by angry babushkas turned
back. The regime since has relied on the neo-fascist Azov Battalion
to harass secessionists in what has become a new “frozen conflict.”
Russia has
no doubt assisted the secessionists while refusing to annex Ukrainian
territory, urging a federal system for the country to be negotiated
by the parties. Russian families straddle the Russian-Ukrainian
border. There are many Afghan War veterans in both countries. The
Soviet munitions industry integrated Russian and Ukrainian elements.
One must assume there are more than enough Russians angry about such
atrocities as the May 2014 killing of 42 ethnic Russian government
opponents in Odessa to bolster the Donbas volunteers.
But there is
little evidence (apart from a handful of reports about convoys of
dozens of “unmarked military vehicles” from Russia in late 2014)
for a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. And the annexation of Crimea
(meaning, its restoration to its 1954 status as Russian territory)
following a credible referendum did not require any “invasion”
since there were already 38,000 Russian troops stationed there. All
they had to do was to secure government buildings, and give Ukrainian
soldiers the option of leaving or joining the Russian military. (A
lot of Ukrainian soldiers opted to stay and accept Russian
citizenship.)
Still, these
two incidents—the brief 2008 war in Georgia, and Moscow’s
(measured) response to the Ukrainian coup since 2014—have been
presented as evidence of a general project to disrupt the world order
by military expansion, requiring a firm U.S. response. The entirety
of the cable news anchor class embraces this narrative.
But they are
blind fools. Who has in this young century disrupted world order more
than the U.S., wrecking whole countries, slaughtering hundreds of
thousands of innocents, provoking more outrage through grotesquely
documented torture, generating new terror groups, and flooding Europe
with refugees who include some determined to sow chaos and terror in
European cities? How can any rational person with any awareness of
history since 1991 conclude that Russia is the aggressive party?
And yet,
this is the conventional wisdom. I doubt you can get a TV anchor job
if you question it. The teleprompter will refer routinely to Putin’s
aggression and Russian expansion and the need for any mature
presidential candidate to respect the time-honored tradition of
supporting NATO no matter what. And now the anchor is expected to
repeat that all 17 U.S. intelligence services have concluded that
Vladimir Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election.
Since there
is zero evidence for this, one must conclude that the Democratic
losers dipped into the reliable grab bag of scapegoats and posited
that Russia and Putin in particular must have hacked the DNC in order
to—through the revelation of primary sources of unquestionable
validity, revealing the DNC’s determination to make Clinton
president, while sabotaging Sanders and promoting (through their
media surrogates) Donald Trump as the Republican candidate—undermine
Clinton’s legitimacy.
All kinds of
liberals, including Sanders’ best surrogates like Nina Turner, are
totally on board the Putin vilification campaign. It is sad and
disturbing that so many progressive people are so willing to jump on
the new Cold War bandwagon. It is as though they have learned nothing
from history but are positively eager, in their fear and rage, to
relive the McCarthy era.
But the
bottom line is: U.S. Russophobia does not rest on reason, judgment,
knowledge of recent history and the ability to make rational
comparisons. It rests on religious-like assumptions of “American
exceptionalism” and in particular the right of the U.S. to expand
militarily at Russia’s expense—-as an obvious good in itself,
rather than a distinct, obvious evil threatening World War III.
The hawks in
Congress—bipartisan, amoral, ignorant, knee-jerk Israel apologists,
opportunist scum—are determined to dissuade the president-elect
(bile rises in my throat as I use that term, but it’s true that
he’s that, technically) from any significant rapprochement with
Russia. (Heavens, they must be horrified at the possibility that
Trump follows Kissinger’s reported advice and recognizes the
Russian annexation of Crimea!) They want to so embarrass him with the
charge of being (as Hillary accused him of being during the campaign)
Putin’s “puppet” that he backs of from his vague promise to
“get along” with Russia.
They don’t
want to get along with Russia. They want more NATO expansion, more
confrontation. They are furious with Russian-Syrian victories over
U.S-backed, al-Qaeda-led forces in Syria, especially the liberation
of Aleppo that the U.S. Media does not cover having no reporters on
the ground, and little interest since events in Syria so powerfully
challenge the State Department’s talking points that shape U.S.
Reporting, misreports systematically, as the tragic triumph of the
evil, Assad’s victory over an imaginary heroic opposition, and sees
the strengthening of the position of the Syrian stats as an
indication of Russia’s reemergence as a superpower. (This they
cannot accept, as virtually a matter of religious conviction; the
U.S. in official doctrine must maintain “full spectrum dominance”
over the world and prohibit the emergence of any possible competitor,
forever.)
The first
Cold War was based on the western capitalists’ fear of socialist
expansion. It was based on the understanding that the USSR had
defeated the Nazis, had extraordinary prestige in the world, and was
the center for a time of the expanding global communist movement. It
was based on the fear that more and more countries would achieve
independence from western imperialism, denying investors their rights
to dominate world markets. It had an ideological content. This one
does not. Russia and the U.S. are equally committed to capitalism and
neoliberal ideology. Their conflict is of the same nature as the U.S.
conflict with Germany in the early 20th century. The Kaiser’s
Germany was at least as “democratic” as the U.S.; the system was
not the issue. It was just jockeying for power, and as it happened,
the U.S. intervening in World War I belatedly, after everybody else
was exhausted, cleaned up. In World War II in Europe, the U.S. having
hesitated to invade the continent despite repeated Soviet appeals to
do so, responded to the fall of Berlin to Soviet forces by rushing
token forces to the city to claim joint credit.
And then it
wound up, after the war, establishing its hegemony over most of
Europe—much, much more of Europe than became the Soviet-dominated
zone, which has since with the Warsaw Pact evaporated. Russia is a
truncated, weakened version of its former self. It is not threatening
the U.S. in any of the ways the U.S. is threatening itself. It is not
expanding a military alliance. It is not holding huge military
exercises on the U.S. border. It is not destroying the Middle East
through regime-change efforts justified to the American people by
sheer misinformation. In September 2015 Putin asked the U.S., at the
United Nations: “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
Unfortunately
the people of this country are not educated, by their schools, press
or even their favorite websites to realize what has been done, how
truly horrible it is, and how based it all is on lies. Fake news is
the order of the day.
Up is down,
black is white, Russia is the aggressor, the U.S. is the victim. The
new president must be a team-player, and for God’s sake, understand
that Putin is today’s Hitler, and if Trump wants to get along with
him, he will have to become a team-player embracing this most basic
of political truths in this particular imperialist country: Russia
(with its nukes, which are equally matched with the U.S. stockpile)
is the enemy, whose every action must be skewed to inflame
anti-Russian feeling, as the normative default sentiment towards this
NATO-encircled, sanction-ridden, non-threatening nation, under what
seems by comparison a cautious, rational leadership?
CNN’s
horrible “chief national correspondent” John King (former husband
of equally horrid Dana Bash, CNN’s “chief political
correspondent”) just posed the question, with an air of aggressive
irritation: “Who does Donald Trump respect more, the U.S.
intelligence agencies, or the guy who started Wikileaks [Assange]?”
It’s a
demand for the Trump camp to buy the Russian blame game, or get
smeared as a fellow-traveler with international whistle-blowers keen
on exposing the multiple crimes of U.S. imperialism.
So the real
question is: Will Trump play ball, and credit the “intelligence
community” that generates “intelligence products” on demand, or
brush aside the war hawks’ drive for a showdown with Putin’s
Russia? Will the second Cold War peter out coolly, or culminate in
the conflagration that “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) was
supposed to render impossible?
The latter
would be utterly stupid. But stupid people—or wise people,
cynically exploiting others’ stupidity— are shaping opinion every
day, and have been since the first Cold War, based like this one on
innumerable lies.
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