Editor’s note: Proxy war and geopolitical jockeying are innate to superpower politics. The war in Ukraine is the direct result of NATO working to, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes,” and of Russia working to expand its imperial influence.
The prize is Ukraine: a wealthy country with massive reserves of oil and gas, minerals, and the most valuable agricultural land in Europe. Ukraine has been a trophy of empires for centuries. To imperialists, land is to be seized and controlled, not revered and respected. For more on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which dates back decades, check out this Green Flame episode from 2020 with Ukrainian-American anti-war activist Sergio Kochergin:
Putin is using the same playbook the United States has used for many years: claiming to be fighting for freedom and self-determination. And he, like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden, is a war criminal.
Now, as Russian protesters are thrown in jail and the U.S. warhawks beat the drums of intervention, the Ukrainian and Russian people and the whole planet will pay the price, and the threat of nuclear war hovers over the world once again. If NATO joins battle with Russia, nuclear strikes become a distinct possibility. The U.S. and Russian militaries have, between them, more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. The strategic doctrine of both call for nuclear options if a conventional war is going poorly.
Finally, we must note that death and destruction is not abnormal within civilization. Forty percent of all human deaths are premature and caused by pollution. Tens of millions die each year due to cars, global warming, mass starvation, and diseases of civilization. War is hell. Modern industrial civilization, dominated by capitalism and patriarchy, is itself a war on women, on the poor, on the planet, and on the future.
Aggressive wars, whether they are waged on nations or on the planet, and whether the weapons are bombs, politics, or bulldozers, are deplorable.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.
by Chris Hedges / Counterpunch
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989 reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.
How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment. If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over the Ukraine.
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”
The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into the Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.
The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to the Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
The conflict in the Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from the Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in the Ukraine became unstoppable.
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab the Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
This first appeared on ScheerPost.
Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash
This war is not simply the result of some sort of political misstep regarding the expansion of NATO, or even the ravenous appetite of the military-industrial complex which Hedges correctly positions at the root of that political error. At this moment of dire multiple life and biosphere-threatening global mega-crises, we need to honestly engage with the roots behind all of it: anthropocentrism, the commodification of nature, ecological overshoot, and the biproduct of each local case of overshoot throughout human history, the creation and perpetuation of unsustainable nation states and empires. Unless humanity begins to openly, publicly, and honestly deal with those roots of why so much is deadly wrong with our prevailing ways of being and acting, and the need to stop all of the errors and start living a very different way, ASAP, only a small remnant of life on Earth might possibly survive the inevitable collapse.
Also, as much as I like Chris Hedges’ writing and thinking, I’ve gotta say that this was really not one of his best pieces. I was very surprised to see his statement about the Obama administration “not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia,” which completely contradicts with their coup of 2014 that he points out later in the essay.
Good points, George. Will Falk wrote yesterday, along a similar vein:
“The news about war in Ukraine causes me to think about how some human cultures have waged a war on the natural world for millennia. War begins with a willingness to exploit the natural world. And, no actually, war is not as old as humanity. Conflict, yes. Violence, too. Sometimes atrocious violence. But, not large scale mobilizations of a population, with professional killers, to invade and permanently dominate distant lands. When you live in balance with your own land base, you don’t need to steal resources from somewhere else.
The horrifying truth is: Human populations have so thoroughly exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity that the so-called resources humans exploit to support the population overshoot are being depleted. When those resources are no longer available, human populations will collapse and humans will suffer on a scale we’ve never seen. The truth is, currently, the dominant culture is just imposing that suffering on the rest of life.
There’s no way out of this mess without extreme suffering. We can voluntarily dismantle the dominant culture that is based in destroying the natural world for the benefit of some humans. This dismantling will be incredibly painful if we are truly going to honor the rest of the natural world’s ability to survive and thrive. If we don’t dismantle the dominant culture, these resource wars are only going to intensify, more places like Ukraine will be plunged into brutal wars, and it just becomes ever-more likely that some humans will choose to use the technologies we now possess to seriously threaten Earth’s ability to support life in the future.
And no, I am not advocating for killing people off. I am, however, insisting that we recognize the suffering the dominant culture causes the countless other beings we share this battered, but still beautiful planet with. I am insisting that we recognize that procrastinating on the very difficult changes we need to make in the name of preserving the dominant culture just pushes the problem on to the natural world and the much more populous, vulnerable, future generations of humans.
If we want to build a world without war, then the first armistice we need to sign is with the natural world.”
Thanks for sharing that, (Boris?). Will states the case for a big picture, eco-centric perspective on human and Earth history very well. We have so normalized the industrial technological and post sustainable periods of human history, we forget (or have always been oblivious to) the fact that for at least 97% of our species’ existence this way of living has not been normal. That skewed perspective of only considering the immediate and more recent states of human being impairs our ability to even imagine alternative states and the real possibilities for creating alternative, local, eco-sustainable societies that might be the only possible pockets of sustainability or survival after the collapse. If enough people, globally, moved in that direction, ASAP, we could abandon the monster machine and shut it down.
This is Max at the moment. Thank you, George, for your insight and for your work on behalf of a better world.
Thanks dear George for your thoughtful and meaningful answers, and thank you all for this great discussion. We are different people from different cultures and we may disagree on many things, which is fine. But I think we all agree on the fact that industrial civilization is not sustainable and will collapse. If we agree on that, we may also agree on that the sooner industrial civilization collapses, the better for what is left of the world. And following that, I hope that we share a similar moral, ethic and mission to do whatever is necessary to stop the destruction and to build alternative cultures inspired by native cultures and permaculture. Thank you all for your great work!
Thank you, Boris. I, too, am very pleased to see such an extensive conversation (much more than the usual one or two comments) on one of DGR News Services many excellent articles.
Obama & Biden fomented the coup in Ukraine, but then Obama refused to further escalate the problem by providing the new U.S. puppet regime with a bunch of weapons, like Trump ended up doing. That doesn’t excuse the U.S.-backed coup, but at least Obama showed a little restraint afterward.
Brilliant analysis from Chris Hedges, well worth watching his interviews on RT too:
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/
In a letter published by the San Mateo, CA “Daily Journal” a month ago, I posed this question:
Suppose the situation were reversed, and it had been NATO that collapsed in 1991. What if the USSR had won the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact had promised not to expand, and had been lying and expanding, ever since?
If Canada now appeared poised to join the Warsaw Pact, cut trade relations with the U.S., and join a commercial pact with the Soviet Union, would anyone be surprised if Biden was massing troops in Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, Northern Michigan, Maine, and Upstate New York?
Not at all. Nor would we be surprised if, last week, Biden had invaded, and we were now killing Canadians in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
As Chris Hedges wrote, “The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured.”
I paid my way through college by cooking in a restaurant owned by a Ukrainian family. My cooking skills (mostly the borscht) earned me an honorary place in several Ukrainian families. I still receive cards and gifts and invitations more than 20 years later. These are loving and resourceful and generous people who would share their food and their home and give you their warm coat if you needed it.
These people are being run from their homes and murdered and your public comment is to game out some “whatabout” fantasy?
@Heidi Hall
Are you kidding? Ukraine is the only country in the world that has a Nazi* contingent as a substantial portion of its military. It also has Nazis in high places in its government. Russia was wrong to invade, the but there are no good guys here, despite your personal interactions with individual Ukrainians. Furthermore, almost everyone who travels internationally has good things to say about the people in the countries to which they travel, that’s absolutely meaningless regarding geopolitics.
*I’m not going to differentiate Nazis from Neo-Nazis, there’s no substantial difference.
Read this article and understand
Wow, it’s the Thacker Pass of Europe! Let’s get Max Wilbert and Will Falk over there to make sure it says in the ground!
I read the Chris Hedges essay elsewhere and I strongly agree with it. However, the editor’s notes here and the essay by Will Falk are better, because they deal with the much bigger problem of humans destroying the Earth and killing the life on it. (Of course if the situation in Ukraine results in nuclear war, that would be humans destroying the Earth and killing the life on it immediately.)
One thing I do challenge is the last paragraph of the editor’s notes. I’ve read contradicting theories on this, but it seems to me that in nature (i.e., living as hunter-gatherers), humans generally only live naturally for around 40 years, with a few living to around 50. With human overpopulation being a primary problem on the planet, how long humans live is not an issue. From a spiritual perspective, we should focus on the quality of our lives, not the quantity. We all live the same amount: one lifetime. Einstein rightly pointed out that time as humans see it is an illusion. Etc. Let’s not obsess on how long people live on a planet with gross human overpopulation.
All empires – OURS included – aim to expand, and capitalism REQUIRES this.
One online article’s headline this week said, “Is it time to break up Russia?” The front page of this week’s NYT Sunday Review said “After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, everything is up for grabs.”
Wonder how all our country’s “excessive savings” and “cheap capital” could “create wealth”, hmm.
That people don’t know – or even care to hear – anything but the relentless good-vs-evil messaging that saturates us, that is alarming.
“War is a continuation of policy by other means.”
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Existing crises need to be dealt with on their own terms rather than grievances and mistakes made years ago for reasons that may have been valid at the time but which have been superseded by recent events and policies. The fact that NATO was founded on the doorstep of Russia was based on actual experience and understanding of Russian foreign policy and nationalism. It may seem provocative to the left today but one could argue that both the Crimean annexation (not mentioned today by leftist journalists at all) and the invasion of Ukraine are proof of the need for NATO because they reveal the inadequacy of policy negotiations as well as the real motivation of Putin, which uses NATO only as its PROXIMATE excuse, while the ULTIMATE reason has been made quite clear and has little to do with NATO but with a Russian desperate grasp to maintain some kind of world presence and influence. Putin well knows no European country or NATO will ever invade Russia or challenge its existence. Using NATO’s history, whether justified or not, is irrelevant to the
unprovoked violence and aggression of Russia, which must be dealt with appropriately and rapidly, on its own merits, with
past mistakes put aside and the immoral actions of Russia confronted on their own.
@Lorna Salzman
You’ve got to be kidding! Everything you said is false or immoral. Russia should just ignore NATO expanding right up to its borders and placing missiles in bordering countries? NATO should have been disbanded as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, and there is no justification for its continued existence. Russia tried to join both NATO and the EU and was rebuffed. Demonizing Putin and Russia is typical American BS, as is your baseless and almost certainly false claim that Putin knows that Russia will never be attacked (this is also ahistorical, as Russia HAS been attacked). All large countries and their leaders are bad, but Putin is no worse than any of them, and in fact his killing pales in comparison to any U.S. president.
As to your advocacy for ignoring the past, that’s equally ridiculous, and it’s exactly one of the main things that propagandists do, taking events out of context in order to brainwash people. Root causes ALWAYS have to be dealt with in order to actually solve problems in a moral and justifiable manner. The root causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are the U.S.-fomented coup that deposed a democratically elected president, and NATO’s nonstop eastward expansion. While I also oppose the invasion, this is highly nuanced, and just saying, USA, USA as you have done doesn’t cut it.
Jeff, as a retired academic historian, I agree with you that the historical context is essential for analyzing current events, but, reiterating slightly what I said above, the history that is most helpful to understanding humanity’s present, interconnected global crises is big picture history. Not only human political and social history, but also the history of our species’ relationship with every other member of the natural world. Like you said, “all of the leaders are bad,” or, more precisely, they are all operating within the corrupt, predatory cultures of imperialist, capitalist nation states. As a general rule, the deeper, more complex, and more pervasive the problem or predicament is, the further back we must search for its roots. I would just add one more element to the beginning of the list of root causes that I gave above, which is lack of gratitude or thanks for the gifts of natural life. That is what led to anthropocentrism, and I say that from an Indigenous perspective.
One last question: why would anybody think that the transformation of the Soviet Union into capitalist Russia would make their enormous empire any safer or less predatory, and thus render the existence of NATO obsolete?
@George Price
I agree with everything you wrote in your first post, and everything in your second post until your final paragraph.
To answer your question, the supposed purpose of NATO was to defend western Europe against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no longer any need for NATO if the U.S. and western Europe were honest about the real purpose of NATO. Post-Soviet Russia was in a shambles, with an ADDITIONAL 500,000 people dying each year because of the removal of the Soviet social safety nets, and U.S. lackey Boris Yeltsin selling off the commonwealth at a steep discount to western corporations. Moreover, Mikhail Gorbachev requested that post-Soviet Russia be allowed to join NATO and was refused. Same when Russia tried to join the EU. So Russia tried to play nice, and the U.S. and its NATO puppets rewarded that friendly behavior by insisting that Russia remain an enemy. So who’s the problem here?
My response to Lorna Salzman was about geopolitics, which is why I didn’t mention anything about the natural world, other species, or any of the spiritual issues you raised. I agree fully with what you said, but those issues were not a part of that exchange.
Thanks for your reply. I was not aware that Russia was in such bad shape back then. Even with their enormous land mass, natural resources (esp. oil), and their industrial/technological infrastructure and massive military weaponry still intact?
@George Price
Oil, infrastructure, and weapons don’t help when you change from a communist system where people are guaranteed jobs, places to live, and healthcare, to a capitalist one where people are guaranteed none of that. Russia was in no shape to threaten anyone when the Soviet Union collapsed, and it’s shameful and disgusting that NATO didn’t either disband or allow Russia to join it. NATO’s eastward expansion is further proof of its ill intent.
Yet, somehow, imperialist nations like the U.S. and China still manage to maintain their positions of global power while continuing to oppress and neglect most of their people. I heard recently that China (which I would call a state-run capitalist corporation, rather than a truly communist society) does not even have universal free health care.
I meant that last comment as a reply to Jeff’s previous last comment.
@Lorna Salzman
Wow, this is one of the most ignorant comments I’ve seen here, nothing but hysterically parroting U.S. and western propaganda.
First and foremost, we are not leftists and DGR is not a leftist group. Yes, we oppose capitalism, because it consumes the Earth, so that fixing environmental problems is impossible without eliminating it. But getting rid of capitalism is only one of many major changes that need to be made in order to properly and adequately address environmental problems.
Second, Salzman doesn’t respond to one point that was made in the column or the comments. Instead, she resorts to name-calling: “delusional,” “blind ideologues,””useful idiots,” “worthless,” “angry snorting teenagers,” “mentally deranged,” etc. If you have no legitimate arguments, you resort to things like name-calling. Not to mention that Salzman projects her own personality onto us here.
Finally, the extreme hysterical gross overreaction to the Russian invasion by Salzman and others like her in the West is beyond words to describe. The U.S. has invaded, multiple countries, both directly and by using proxies, over the past 20 or so years, has illegally occupied three countries that it invaded, has caused far more death & destruction than Russia will cause in this invasion, had absolutely no legitimate grievances against any of those countries, and none of those countries were anywhere near the U.S. Yet the whole western world thinks that Russia is the big evil on the planet and should be utterly destroyed because of this invasion? While we all agree that the invasion was wrong, the gross overreaction to it is even worse and could very well lead to WW III and nuclear war. I guess this is a result of years of the Russiagate BS that brainwashed so many people, who now think that Russia is some big evil. All I can say to Americans is, look in the damn mirror. The U.S. is Mordor, the evil empire, and objectively the dominant empire on the planet that has caused more harm, death, and destruction over the past 20-25 years than Russia or Putin could ever dream of causing (not that they dream of that).
Despite all this, Salzman calls us “mentally deranged.” Again, look in the mirror!
When we rail against capitalism, we are told democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, that they are basically synonymous. But somehow, our incessant wars are never to “bring capitalism” to other societies. Wonder why THAT is.