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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/this-geopolitical-war-is-a-geopolitical-crime/">palestinechronicle.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">This Geopolitical War is a 'Geopolitical Crime'</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">April 10, 2022<br></div>
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<img src="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Un-678x455.png" alt="" title="UN-Ukraine" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="408" height="274">
Emergency Security Council meeting on Ukraine. (Photo: Evan Schneider, via United Nations website)
<p><strong>By <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/richard-falk" title="Display all articles for Richard Falk">Richard Falk</a></strong></p><p>There
is no doubt that atrocities have been committed in Ukraine, seemingly
yet not exclusively by Russian attacking forces, and in a perfect world,
those who so acted would be held responsible. But the world is highly
imperfect when it comes to accountability for international crimes.</p>
<p>When the International Criminal Court in 2020 found it had the
authority to investigate alleged crimes committed by Israel in Occupied
Palestine after painstaking delays to make sure that their inquiry would
meet the highest standard of legal professionalism, the decision was
called ‘pure anti-Semitism’ by the Israeli prime minister, and defiantly
rejected by Israeli leaders across the whole political spectrum.</p>
<p>Similarly, when authorization was given by the ICC to investigate
crimes by the United States in Afghanistan, the decision was denounced
as void and unwarranted because the US was not a party to the Rome
Statute governing the operations of the ICC. The Trump presidency went
so far as to express its outrage by imposing personal sanctions on the
ICC prosecutor, presumably for daring to challenge the US in such a
manner even though her behavior was entirely respectful of her
professional role and consistent with relevant canons of judicial
practice.</p>
<p>Against such a background, there is a typical liberal quandary when
faced with clear criminality on one side and pure geopolitical hypocrisy
on the other side. Was it desirable after World War II to prosecute
surviving German and Japanese political leaders and military commanders
at the ‘legal’ cost of overlooking the criminality of the victors
because there was no disposition to investigate the dropping of atom
bombs on Japanese cities or the strategic bombing of civilian habitats
in Germany and Japan?</p>
<p>I am far from sure about what is better from the perspective of
either developing a global rule of law or inducing respect for the
restraints of law. The essence of law is treating equals equally, but
world order is not so constituted. As suggested, there is ‘victors’
justice’ imposing accountability on the defeated leadership in major
wars but complete non-accountability for the crimes of the geopolitical
winners.</p>
<p>Beyond this, the UN Charter was drafted in ways that gave
constitutional status to geopolitical impunity by granting these victors
in World War II an unconditional right of veto, and this of course
includes Russia. In these respects, liberalism defers to geopolitical
realism, and celebrates the one-sided imposition of legality, with the
naïve hope things will be different in the future, and the next group of
victors will themselves accept the same legal standards of
accountability that are imposed upon the losers.</p>
<p>Yet the post-Nuremberg record shows that geopolitical actors go on
treating restraints on recourse to war as a matter of discretion (what
American liberals called ‘wars of choice’ in the course of the debate
about embarking upon a regime-changing attack on and occupation of Iraq
in 2003) rather than an obligation. When it comes to accountability,
double standards are still operative, illustrated by the ironic
execution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes in the wake of a war of
aggression against Iraq.</p>
<p>Another lingering question is ‘why Ukraine’? There have been other
horrific events in the period since the end of the Cold War in the early
1990s, including Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Palestine, yet
no comparable clamor in the West for criminal justice and punitive
action. Certainly, a part of the explanation is that the Ukrainian
victims of abuse are white, European and Christian, which made it easy
for the West to mobilize the mainstream global media, and the related
international prominence accorded to Volodimir Zelensky, the embattled,
energetic Ukrainian leader given unprecedented access to the most
influential venues on the global stages of world opinion.</p>
<p>It is not that the empathy for Ukraine or support for Zelensky’s
national resistance is misplaced, but that it has the appearance of
being geopolitically orchestrated and manipulated in ways that other
desperate national situations were not, and thus gives rise to
suspicions about other, darker motives.</p>
<p>This is worrisome because these magnified concerns have acted as a
principal way that the NATO West has gone out of its way to make the
Ukrainian War about more than Ukraine. The wider war is best understood
as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading
forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine as intertwined with
an encompassing geopolitical war between the US and Russia. It is the
prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to
world peace, a danger that has been largely obscured or assessed as a
mere extension of the Russia/Ukraine confrontation.</p>
<p>Biden has consistently struck a militarist, demonizing, and
confrontational note in the geopolitical war, deliberately antagonizing
Putin while quite pointedly neglecting diplomacy as the obvious way to
stop the killing, and atrocities, in effect, encouraging the war on the
ground to be prolonged because its continuation is indispensable in
relation to the implicitly higher stakes of grand strategy, which is the
core preoccupation of a geopolitical war. When Biden repeatedly calls
Putin a war criminal who should face prosecution, and even more so, when
he proposes regime change in Russia, he is cheerleading for the
Ukrainian War to continue as long as it takes to produce a victory, and
not to be content with a ceasefire.</p>
<p>If this two-level perception is correctly analyzed in its
appreciation of the different actors with contradictory priorities, then
it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the US is
the aggressor as much as in the traditional war on the ground Russia is
the aggressor. In these respects, despite his understandable anger and
grief, one must wonder whether even Zelensky, with Russo-phobic echoing
of war crimes allegations and calls for the expulsion of Russia from the
UN, has not had his arm twisted so as to support the geopolitical war
despite its premises being contrary to the interests of the Ukrainian
people.</p>
<p>Could the delivery of weapons and financial assistance to Ukraine come with a large price tag?</p>
<p>So far, the geopolitical war has been waged as a war of ideological
aggression backed up by weapons supplies and enveloping sanctions
designed to have a great and crippling effect on Russia. This tactic has
led Putin to make counter-threats, including warnings about Russia’s
willingness under certain conditions to have recourse to nuclear
weapons. This normalizing of the nuclear danger is itself a menacing
development in a context of an autocratic leader backed into a corner.</p>
<p>The US approach, while mindful of escalation dangers and taking steps
so far to avoid direct military involvement on behalf of Ukraine, shows
no rush to end the fighting, apparently believing that Russia is
already suffering the consequences of greatly underestimating Ukrainian
will and capability to resist, and will be forced to acknowledge a
humiliating defeat if the war goes on, which would have the strategic
benefit, additional to other incentives, of discouraging China from
aligning with Russia in the future.</p>
<p>Additionally, the Western architects of this geopolitical war with
Russia seem to assess gains and losses through a militarist optic, being
grossly insensitive to its disastrous economic spillover effects,
especially pronounced in relation to food and energy security in the
already extremely stress conditions of the Middle East, Africa, and
Central Asia, and even Europe. As Fred Bergsten argues, the overall
stability of the world economy is also being put at great risk unless
the US and China overcome their own tense relationship, and come to
understand that their cooperation is the only check on a deep, costly,
and prolonged world economic collapse.</p>
<p>The geopolitical war also distracts attention from the urgent agenda
of climate change, especially in light of recent indicators of global
warming causing climate experts to be further alarmed. Other matter of
global concern including migration, biodiversity, poverty and apartheid
are being again relegated to the back burners of global policy
challenge, while the sociopathic game of Armageddon Roulette is being
played without taking species wellbeing and survival into account,
continuing the lethal recklessness that began the day the bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima more than 75 years ago.</p>
<p>In concluding, the question ‘why Ukraine?’ calls for answers. The
standard answer of reverse racism, moral hypocrisy, and Western
narrative control is not wrong but significantly incomplete if it does
not include the geopolitical war that, while not now directly
responsible for Ukrainian suffering, is from other perspectives more
dangerous and destructive than that awful traditional war. This
geopolitical war of ‘poor’ choice is now being waged mainly by means of
hostile propaganda, but also weapons and supplies while not killing
directly outside of Ukraine.</p>
<p>This second war, so rarely identified much less assessed, is
irresponsibly menacing the wellbeing of tens of millions of civilians
around the world while arms dealers, post-conflict construction
companies, and civilian and uniformed militarists exult. To be
provocative, I would say that it is time for the peace movement to make
sure that the US loses this geopolitical war! To win it, even persisting
with it, would constitute a grave ‘geopolitical crime.’</p>
<div><p><img src="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Falk-bio.png" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" width="180" height="180"></p><p><span><i><span>–
Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International
Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of
Global Studies. He was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on
Palestinian human rights. This article originally appeared on </span></i><a href="https://richardfalk.org/"><i><span>his blog</span></i></a><i><span>.</span></i>
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