[News] This Is Not the Age of Certainty. We Are in the Time of Contradictions
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Thu Apr 7 09:13:22 EDT 2022
This Is Not the Age of Certainty. We Are in the Time of Contradictions:
The Fourteenth Newsletter (2022)
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*This Is Not the Age of Certainty. We Are in the Time of Contradictions:
The Fourteenth Newsletter (2022)*
Henry Moore (Britain), Grey Tube Shelter, 1940.
Henry Moore
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(Britain), /Grey Tube Shelter/, 1940.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research
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It is hard to fathom the depths of our time, the terrible wars, and the
confounding information that whizzes by without much wisdom. Certainties
that flood the airwaves and the internet are easy to come by, but are
they derived from an honest assessment of the war
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in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russian banks (part of a broader
United States sanctions policy that now afflicts
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approximately thirty countries)? Do they acknowledge the horrific
reality of hunger
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that has increased due to this war and the sanctions? It appears that
much of the ‘certainties’ are caught up in the ‘Cold War mentality’,
which views humanity as irreversibly divided on two opposing sides.
However, this is not the case; most countries are struggling to craft a
non-aligned approach to the US-imposed ‘new Cold War’. Russia’s conflict
with Ukraine is a symptom of broader geopolitical battles that have been
waged over decades.
On 26 March, US President Joe Biden defined some certainties from his
perspective at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (Poland), calling
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the war in Ukraine ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy, between
liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by
brute force’. These binaries are wholly a fantasy of the White House,
whose attitude towards ‘rules-based order’ is not rooted in the UN
Charter but in ‘rules’ that the US pronounces. Biden’s antinomies
culminated in one policy objective: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot
remain in power’, he said, meaning Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
The narrowness of Biden’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine has led to
a public call for regime change in Russia, a country of 146 million
people whose government possesses
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6,255 nuclear warheads. With the US’s violent history of controlling
leadership in several countries, reckless statements about regime change
cannot go unanswered. They must be universally contested.
Juss Piho
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(Estonia), /Journey/, 2009.
The principal axis of Russia’s war is not actually Ukraine, though it
bears the brunt of it today. It is whether Europe can be permitted to
forge projects independently of the US and its North Atlantic agenda.
Between the fall of the USSR (1991) and the world financial crisis
(2007–08), Russia, the new post-Soviet republics (including Ukraine),
and other Eastern European states sought to integrate into the European
system, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Russia
joined
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NATO’s Partnership for Peace process in 1994, and seven Eastern European
countries (including Estonia and Latvia that border Russia) joined
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NATO in 2004. During the global financial crisis, it became evident that
integration into the European project would not be fully possible
because of vulnerabilities in Europe.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, President Vladimir
Putin challenged
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the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world. ‘What is a unipolar
world?’, Putin asked. ‘No matter how we beautify this term, it means one
single centre of power, one single centre of force, and one single
master’. Referring to US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty in 2002 (which he had criticised
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at that time) and the US’s illegal Iraq War in 2003, Putin said, ‘Nobody
feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law’.
Later, at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest (Romania), Putin warned
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about the dangers of NATO’s eastward expansion, lobbying against the
entry of Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. The next year,
Russia partnered with Brazil, China, India, and South Africa to form
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the BRICS bloc as an alternative to Western-driven globalisation.
Yang Fudong (China), /Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest/,/Part IV/, 2006.
For generations, Europe has relied on imports of natural gas and crude
oil first from the USSR and then from Russia. This dependence on Russia
has increased as European countries have sought to end their use of coal
and nuclear energy. At the same time, Poland
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(2015) and Italy
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(2019) signed onto the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Between 2012 and 2019, the Chinese government also formed the 17+1
Initiative
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linking seventeen central and Eastern European countries in the BRI
project. The integration of Europe into Eurasia opened the door for its
foreign policy independence. But this was not permitted. The entire
‘global NATO’ feint – articulated
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in 2008 by NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer – was part of
preventing this development.
Fearful of the great changes occurring in Eurasia, the US acted on
commercial and diplomatic/military fronts. Commercially, the US tried to
substitute European reliance on Russian natural gas by promising
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to supply Europe with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from both US suppliers
and Gulf Arab states. Since LNG is far more expensive than piped gas,
this was not an enticing commercial deal. Challenges to Chinese
advancements in high-tech solutions – particularly in
telecommunications, robotics, and green energy – could not be sustained
by Silicon Valley firms, so the US escalated
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two other instruments of force: first, the use of War on Terror rhetoric
to ban Chinese firms (claiming security and privacy considerations) and
second, diplomatic and military manoeuvres to challenge Russia’s sense
of stability.
Sadamasa Motonaga (Japan), /Red and Yellow/, 1963.
The US’s strategy was not entirely successful. European countries could
see that there was no effective substitute for both Russian energy and
Chinese investment. Banning Huawei’s telecommunications tools and
preventing NordStream 2 from certification would only hurt the European
people. This was clear. But what was not so clear was that the US
concurrently began to dismantle the architecture that held in place
confidence that no country would begin a nuclear war. In 2002, the US
unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in
2018–19, they left
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the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. European countries
played a key role in establishing the INF Treaty in 1987 through the
‘nuclear freeze’ movement, but the abandonment of the treaty in 2018–19
was met with relative silence from Europeans. In 2018, US National
Security Strategy shifted from its focus on the Global War on Terror to
the prevention
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of the ‘re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition’ from
‘near-peer rivals
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such as China and Russia. At the same time, European countries began to
carry out ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises through NATO in the Baltic
Sea, the Arctic Sea, and South China Sea, sending threatening messages
to China and Russia. These moves effectively brought China and Russia
very close together.
Russia indicated on several occasions that it was aware of these tactics
and would defend its borders and its region with force. When the US
intervened in Syria in 2012 and Ukraine in 2014, these moves threatened
Russia with the loss of its two main warm water ports (in Latakia, Syria
and Sebastopol, Crimea), which is why Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and
intervened militarily in Syria in 2015. These actions suggested that
Russia would continue to use its military to protect what it sees as its
national interests. Ukraine then shut down the North Crimean canal that
brought the peninsula 85% of its water, forcing Russia to supply the
region with water over the Kerch Strait Bridge, built at enormous cost
between 2016 and 2019. Russia did not need ‘security guarantees’ from
Ukraine, or even from NATO, but it sought them from the United States.
There was fear in Moscow that the US would place intermediate range
nuclear missiles around Russia.
Evgeny Trotsky (Russia), /Rest/, 2016.
In light of this recent history, contradictions rattle the responses of
Germany, Japan, and India, amongst others. Each of these countries needs
Russian natural gas and crude oil. Both Germany and Japan have
sanctioned Russian banks, but neither German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can cut
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energy imports. India, despite being part of the US-backed Quad along
with Japan, has refused to join the condemnation of Russia and the
sanctions on its banking sector. These countries have to manage the
contradictions of our time and weigh up the uncertainties. No state
should accept the so-called ‘certainties’ that reinforce Cold War
dynamics, nor should they neglect the dangerous outcomes of externally
influenced regime change and chaos.
It is always a good idea to reflect on the quiet charm of the poems of
Tōge Sankichi, who watched the atomic bomb fall on his native Hiroshima
in 1945, and then later joined the Japanese Communist Party to fight for
peace. In his ‘Call to Action’, Sankichi wrote
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stretch out those grotesque arms
to the many similar arms
and, if it seems like that flash might fall again,
hold up the accursed sun:
even now it is not too late.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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