[News] Collaboration, Not Confrontation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdemocracy.in
<https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2023/0924_pd/collaboration-not-confrontation>
Collaboration, Not Confrontation
September 24, 2023
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LET’S begin with a truism: the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be ended
either by defeat of one side or by a diplomatic settlement. That much at
least should be beyond debate. A defeat is simply not on the cards, since
the west will not allow Ukraine to be totally defeated, and Russia – a
major nuclear power – cannot be defeated without the prospect of the
introduction of nuclear weapons into the conflict. Since, a defeat of one
side or the other is simply not possible, the only way forward is through a
diplomatic settlement. The alternative, put simply, is collective suicide
as both sides move up the escalation ladder until it is too late.

The United States has articulated a policy that it wishes to continue this
war to severely ‘weaken Russia’ – as US defence secretary Lloyd Austin and
other high officials have been explicitly stating – and, it is claimed, to
place Ukraine in a stronger bargaining position for eventual negotiations
(or in a weaker position, if the Russian offensive makes an impact, a
strong likelihood that is quietly ignored). The policy of trying to ‘weaken
Russia’ through the escalation of the war in Ukraine is the position of the
United States and the United Kingdom, and with some variation, their
European allies (France, as usual, demurs here and there, but when push
comes to shove, lines up with Washington).

*EXTINCTION AND ANNIHILATION*

The rest of the world, overwhelmingly, is calling for a diplomatic
settlement to end the horrors before they become even worse. It will be
worse first for Ukraine, which has lost tens of thousands of soldiers and
suffered major economic damage across the country (as well as lost
substantial parts of its territory to Russia). The Ukrainian
counter-offensive has failed. The desperation in Kyiv demonstrates that
there are few quivers left in Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s
arsenal.

The severe destruction in Ukraine, however, is nothing like the US-UK
shock-and-awe style of war, as we saw against Iraq in 2003 and Libya in
2011, which goes straight to the jugular, demolishing energy,
transportation, and communication systems, namely anything that allows a
modern society to function; neither has Ukraine experienced the use of
illegal and near-illegal weapons systems based on depleted uranium and
white phosphorus (used by the United States in Iraq). No heads of state
from the western countries visited Baghdad while the US and the UK were
demolishing it. The argument about double standards is not a talking point
for anyone, but a simple fact based on the evidence.

The bitter costs of the war are, of course, not limited to Ukraine and
Russia. Millions are facing starvation as grain and fertilizer supplies are
curtailed from the rich Black Sea region, and food prices soar along with
the profits of a handful of multinational corporations that dominate the
global food system. The Black Sea Grain Initiative – made between Ukraine,
Russia, Turkey, and the United Nations in July 2022 for 120 days and then
subsequently extended – has moved over twenty million tonnes of grain from
the region to the rest of the world; this is much below the normal, but
nonetheless – as the UN secretary general António Guterres called a ‘beacon
of hope’, an illustration that a wider peace agreement is possible. The
fate of this initiative is unknown.

Long before the war, humanity faced the pressing problems of extinction
(due to the environmental catastrophe) and annihilation (accelerated by the
collapse of the nuclear weapons regulation regime, spurred on by the US
unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies Treaty in
2020). This conflict in Ukraine and the tensions around the South China Sea
make it easy to envision steps up the escalation ladder, with one such step
being Russia’s suspension of participation in the New START treaty in
February 2023. The limited steps to address imminent environmental
catastrophe with the watered-down climate change agreements and the
weakened environmental protection treaties do not offer confidence that
humanity can prevent the death knell for organised human life on earth, and
even these inadequate steps have been reversed in the course of the Ukraine
war.

*GHASTLY GAMBLE*

It is far too little discussed, but the US-UK stance entails a ghastly
gamble with the fate of Ukraine and far beyond. The gamble is that if the
‘demented madman’ Putin faces defeat, as the US-UK portray the situation,
then he will quietly pack his bags and slink away to oblivion or worse, and
will not use the conventional weapons that Russia has at the ready, and
which it could use to emulate US-UK war in Iraq and, or of Israel against
Gaza, and devastate Ukraine, including Kyiv and the western areas so far
mostly spared from the worst of the battles.

A moment’s thought should suffice to reveal the ghastliness of this gamble.
One can easily see why outside the western propaganda bubble, much of the
world sees the conflict as a proxy war between the United States – using
the now buoyant North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – and Russia,
with Ukrainian bodies as the chessboard. If Ukrainians choose to take the
gamble, that’s their business, although it should be remembered that
Zelenskyy came to office in 2019 on a peace platform that authorised him to
cut a deal with Russia and not escalate the situation to war. The appetite
for peace was very much in evidence in Ukraine, including in 2014 when
Ukraine’s then president Petro Poroshenko promised to ‘end the war in two
weeks’. Now, NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg says, ‘We must prepare ourselves
for a long war in Ukraine’ (to Germany’s Funke media group in
mid-September). The cost will not be paid by ‘we’, but by ordinary
Ukrainians and Russians who are dying in large numbers.

That the United States is imposing the gamble on Ukraine (to ‘weaken
Russia’), sending arms and building up the illusion of a victory while
blocking diplomacy, is incontestable. It has influenced the general mood
within Ukraine, turning the possibility of peace into the endless horror of
war.

For almost everyone, the war is a disaster, increasingly so the longer it
persists.  Almost everyone. Some are doing just fine. In the corporate
offices of fossil fuel companies and military producers, and the financial
institutions that sustain them, euphoria is unbounded. They are enjoying
record-breaking profits. In October 2022, the Pentagon said that it was
giving out 1.2 billion dollars in contracts to arms manufacturers to
replenish US military stocks used in Ukraine, an announcement that sent the
stocks of Northrop Grumman up by 40 per cent and of Lockheed Martin up by
37 per cent. Due to the blockage of Russian gas into Europe, western energy
companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies – made 134
billion dollars in excess profits in 2022. The arms and energy firms
continue to churn out their toxic products, increasing the prospect for
destroying organised human life on earth by exploiting new regions for
fossil fuel production and for war.

*GLOBAL NATO*

In the geopolitical dimension, Washington has registered great gains.
Before the escalation of the conflict against Russia (with Ukraine as the
flashpoint) and against China (with Taiwan as the flashpoint), NATO edged
towards obsolescence. In 2006, Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier wrote a
piece in *Foreign Affairs* calling for a ‘Global NATO’, a project that then
seemed entirely quixotic despite the ‘out of area’ operation by NATO in
Afghanistan. Five years later, in 2011, NATO conducted an ‘out of area’
operation against Libya, whose actions had not triggered Article 5 that
enjoins the alliances only to enter in defence of a member state. But even
the adventure in Libya, which virtually destroyed that country, did not
drive the momentum towards giving NATO a lease of life after the Cold War
and indeed to allow it a global footprint. It was the New Cold War against
China and Russia that brought the idea of Global NATO to the fore and
allowed the United States to use NATO as an instrument to revitalise the
deteriorating Atlantic alliance (threatened as Europe was integrating with
Russia for energy and with China for investment). Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine cemented the revitalisation of NATO, giving the United States a
marvellous gift on a silver platter: Europe.

Since Second World War, there has been deep concern in Washington that
Europe might move on an independent course, developing its very natural
commercial and other relations with the east – a ‘marriage made in heaven’,
as some economists describe it, between German-based advanced industrial
Europe and the rich material resources of the east, with the enormous
China-based market beckoning beyond. Those opportunities became more real
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a
‘common European home’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, with no military
alliances, no victors and defeated, and common steps towards a social
democratic future. That was not to be. US president Bill Clinton launched a
new cold war by violating the firm and unambiguous promise by President
George H W Bush that NATO would not expand one inch to the east of Germany
if Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany to be unified and furthermore, to join
NATO, a hostile military alliance – not a small concession in the light of
history. Clinton betrayed the handshake agreement made by US secretary of
state James Baker and the last Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze
on February 9, 1990, an agreement about which there is a great deal of
deceit by western commentators but which was indeed firm and unambiguous as
can be seen from the actual text of the agreement (‘There would, of course,
have to be iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would
not move eastward. And this would have to be done in a manner that would
satisfy Germany’s neighbours to the east’; at that time, Baker said to
Mikhail Gorbachev,‘We understand the need for assurances to the countries
in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO,
there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one
inch to the east’). NATO’s head Jens Stoltenberg recently acknowledged that
this war is due to his organisation’s eastward provocation.

NATO began its march eastward by absorbing the Czech Republic, Hungary, and
Poland (in 1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia,
and Slovenia (in 2004), Albania and Croatia (in 2009), Montenegro (in
2017), and finally North Macedonia (in 2020). At the 2008 Bucharest Summit,
overruling French and German objections under US pressure, the NATO member
states agreed that Georgia and Ukraine ‘will become members of NATO in the
future’. This was held in April 2008, and just a few months later, in
August, Georgia and Russia fought a war over the breakaway Russian-majority
areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – a war that was a prelude to the
conflict around Ukraine. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin had sounded the
alarm at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, when he said that the world
does not need a ‘single master’ and where he suggested the necessity for
security guarantees for Russia. These points were disregarded, and Putin –
who had been a loyal ally of the west – was now denigrated for his audacity
to question US leadership (this is when Putin, the great democrat to Bush
and Blair before 2007, became the great dictator). The US unilateral
withdrawal from nuclear weapons treaties suggested to the Russians that the
west might not only expand NATO but place lethal weaponry within striking
distance of major Russian cities, which would not be able to protect
themselves. This steady march toward confrontation – including the US
meddling in the politics of Ukraine a decade ago – leads directly to
today’s horror show, with worse to come if this is not brought to an end.

*NEW COLD WAR*

With Europe now safely in Washington’s pocket, at least for now, the United
States has been able to extend the NATO military alliance to the
Indo-Pacific region, enlisting NATO in its confrontation with China, which
is even more ominous than the terrible events in Europe. The US
Indo-Pacific project includes the building up of military alliances around
China (such as the Quad – with Australia, India, and Japan) and by the
creation of NATO Plus (which includes Australia, Israel, Japan, New
Zealand, and South Korea).

The neoconservatives who run US president Joe Biden’s foreign policy have
ramped up this confrontation against China. In official terminology, China
is now ‘encircled’ by ‘sentinel states’, who are armed with advanced US
precision weapons aimed at China, backed by massive naval manoeuvres in the
Pacific Ocean. Nuclear-capable B-52s are now based in Darwin (Australia)
and in Guam, within easy striking distance of China.

Taiwan is the major flash point. In late February 2023, US House Foreign
Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul told *ABC News* that it is
‘Ukraine today. It’s going to be Taiwan tomorrow’. For fifty years, the One
China policy has kept peace in Taiwan, not an inconsiderable achievement in
international affairs. It is now seriously threatened, primarily by highly
provocative US initiatives that are familiar: the visit of US elected
officials led by house speaker Nancy Pelosi was followed by other reckless
acts of this nature. The Taiwan Policy Act (2021-2022) passed by the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee calls for granting Taiwan the diplomatic status
of a non-NATO ally, with no diplomatic restrictions, along with enhanced
military aid and training and interoperability of military forces – all
eerily similar to Ukraine policies of the past decade.

Most serious of all, Biden’s team has now declared economic war on China,
as it is rightly termed by the international financial press, designed to
prevent China’s technological development. The trade war against China and
now the militarisation of that trade war is not about ‘Chinese aggression’
but about the failure of US businesses to compete with Chinese businesses.
Rather than allow for competition, the US government has intervened with
sanctions against these sectors and against specific companies (such as
Huawei). As in the case of unilateral US sanctions against other countries
(such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran), other states and businesses must
observe them whether they like it or not; typically, they don’t like it,
but in that case, tough luck. It is dangerous to defy the master. This
godfather-like policy towards China is a further blow to Europe, which is
already facing a form of deindustrialisation as it follows US demands about
cutting energy purchases from Russia and cutting investments from China.
The Netherlands, for example, has the world’s most advanced lithographic
industry, a prime component in production of the semiconductors that are
the core of the advanced economy. Losing the rich China market, under US
threats, would be no small blow. The same is true for South Korea’s Samsung
and for Japan’s advanced industries. How long they will be willing to
endure all of this is one of the many uncertainties in the troubled world
scene.

Meanwhile China is proceeding with its global loan and development
projects, incorporating Eurasia, extending to Africa, the Middle East, and
even to the US backyard in Latin America, much to Washington’s distress.
The Belt and Road Initiative – now a decade old – and the concessionary
lending by the People’s Bank of China in local currencies comes alongside
the fact that China is now the leading trade partner with most countries in
the global south. Despite the pandemic and the anti-China policies of the
US government, in November 2020 fifteen countries met in Hanoi (Vietnam) to
join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) to create the
largest trading bloc in history, one that is anchored by the Chinese
economy. The United States is not in RCEP, and the US government’s own
Trans-Pacific Partnership is now defunct.

There is a famous ditty of Hilaire Belloc’s about the British empire in its
heyday: ‘Whatever happens we have got, the maxim gun and they have not’.
Guns are not enough to stop China’s development and expansion of its
influence, and efforts at economic strangulation are not very likely to
succeed either. Most of the world is having nothing to do with it and is
moving towards a world order that has ‘no single master’, an order where
regionalism has come to be an effective institutional force and where
regionalism plus (such as through alliances like BRICS with Brazil, Russia,
India, China, and South Africa – now expanded by six major countries,
including leading producers of energy) playing an increasingly important
role in world affairs (initially in trade relations, but increasingly in
the world of politics).

A final word. Everything we have discussed is clinically insane, the
behaviour of societies gone completely mad as they stampede to suicide.
There’s a reason why the hands of the Doomsday Clock were advanced to 90
seconds to midnight. We are racing towards destruction of the environment
that sustains life. Terminal nuclear war is an increasing threat in Europe
and Asia. New pandemics are likely, which may make this one look like a
picnic in the park. None of these lethal dangers have boundaries. The great
powers will either find ways to accommodate and to cooperate for the common
good, or they will all collapse together. At the start of the pandemic, the
head of the World Health Organisation Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged
the countries of the world to be more collaborative and less
confrontational. Common problems needed common solutions, he said. These
are wise words, and they need to be heeded.
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