-->
Ukraine: Current Focal Point of the
U.S.-Led Imperialist War Drive
by
RAY LIGHT
The picturesque
cover of the 4-19 to 4-25-14 edition of the British ruling class newsweekly, The Economist, is a fancifully
rendered map of western Russia, Ukraine and the Black Sea. Russia is
imaginatively drawn as a big, hungry bear about to devour Ukraine and the word
“Insatiable” is presented in large black type so that the cover’s message is
unmistakably clear.
However, it
would be a real mistake for the working people of the USA and the workers and
oppressed masses of the world to believe that this Disney cartoon-like fantasy
map contains a real explanation for the events of the past few months involving
Ukraine, Crimea and Russia.
The truth is
just the opposite. As U.S. imperialist apologist G. John Ikenberry observes in
the current issue of the authoritative Foreign
Affairs quarterly journal, “As worrisome [for U.S.
imperialism] as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves in Crimea have been,
they reflect Russia’s geopolitical vulnerability, not its strength.” Ikenberry
substantiates his argument as follows: “Over the last two decades, the West has
crept closer to Russia’s borders. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and
Poland entered NATO. They were joined in 2004 by seven more former members of
the Soviet bloc, and in 2009, by Albania and Croatia. In the meantime, six
former Soviet
republics have headed down the path to membership by joining NATO’s Partnership
for Peace program. … even though Putin is winning some small battles, he is
losing the war. Russia is not on the rise; to the contrary, it is experiencing
one of the greatest geopolitical contractions of any major power in the modern
era.” (page 86, “The Illusion of Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs, May-June 2014)
In this
context, it is more accurate to view “the Russian bear,” surrounded by U.S and
NATO military bases, and isolated politically and economically as well, like a
cornered animal. It is the insatiable appetite of U.S.-led
imperialism for maximum private profit that has finally provoked the Russian
bear to lash out and fight back.
***
-The Debate On the U.S.-led Response to Russia’s Annexation of
Crimea-
The
Economist’s lead article, like its front cover in the
4-19 to 4-25 edition, is also entitled “Insatiable.” It strongly editorializes
for the western imperialist powers to “stand up” to Putin’s Russia right now in
order to stifle and suppress the momentum caused by Russia’s successful
annexation of Crimea.* Among The Economist recommendations: NATO military exercises in central and eastern
Europe, “strengthen air and cyber defenses there and immediately send some
troops, missiles and aircraft to the Baltics and Poland … [and] NATO members
should … increase their military spending.”
The article also recommends increasing economic and financial sanctions
against powerful Russians and “cut Russia off from dollars, euros and sterling”
which would “deprive Russia of revenues from oil and gas exports, priced in
dollars, and force it to draw on reserves to pay for most of its imports.”(page
11)
*NOTE: [Incredibly,
the article admits Crimea “should have been Russian all along.”]
Most of the
other four or five articles on Ukraine and Russia that appeared in the same
issue of The Economist were much more nuanced than the “insatiable” cover and lead
article or even contradicted them. The article focusing on financial sanctions (“Turning off the
taps”) explained that, “Finance is the obvious place to start because of the
pre-eminence of the dollar, America’s central role in the clearing of
cross-border bank and credit-card transactions, and the American-led
globalization of money-laundering compliance.” Nevertheless, while pointing out
that even the limited sanctions already applied had had a “chilling effect on
business in Russia,” the article admits that “sanctions will have collateral
damage; hit Rosneft and you hurt BP, which owns 20% of it, and ExxonMobil, its
partner in various projects around the world.” Furthermore, the article points
to the likelihood of “countermeasures” that the Russian government could take
against “foreign investors” or against “American banks and exchanges.”
A second
article on business in Russia focuses on the already weakened ruble. But it
also points to “a long promised deal for Gazprom to sell gas to China. Rosneft
is seeking to treble its exports of oil to China. Sukhoi, a state-owned
aircraft-maker, has just struck a deal to sell a fleet of small passenger jets
to a Chinese airline … But its plane is chock full of key parts from American
and European suppliers and thus its production is vulnerable to any tightening
of sanctions.” Both these articles make clear that punitive measures against
Russia are an even more complicated undertaking for U.S. and western finance
capital than in the past. The increased internationalization of finance capital
makes it even more of a priority to precisely “follow the money.”
Even the most
alarming-sounding article, “Boys from the blackstuff,” dealing with
“Russian-inspired occupations in the industrial east” in the aftermath of the
annexation of Crimea, observes that “Mr. Putin … seems unlikely to want to
annex any more of the country.” Still more noteworthy is the matter of fact
statement in the article’s conclusion that, “Russia wants to turn Ukraine back
into a buffer state …”
It is this
admission that Russia desires to have Ukraine as “a buffer state” that gives
the lie to the whole propaganda campaign of U.S.-led imperialism against the
allegedly “aggressive” Putin and Russia.
***
The May/June
2014 issue of Foreign Affairs contains three articles (including Ikenberry’s) that address the
current crisis in Ukraine. Reminiscent of The
Economist’s 4-19 to 4-25 “hungry bear” cover, Jeffrey
Mankoff’s article is entitled, “Russia’s Latest Land Grab.” Mankoff, Deputy
Director and Fellow in the Russian and Eurasia Program at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, opens with the following dramatic
declaration: “Russia’s occupation and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in
February and March have plunged Europe into one of its gravest crises since the
end of the Cold War.”
But Mankoff
then provides some historical perspective, pointing out that, “since the early
1990’s, Russia has either directly supported or contributed to the emergence of
four breakaway ethnic regions in Eurasia: … [Transnistria, Abkhazia, South
Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh] … in which the splinter territories remain beyond
the control of the central governments and the local de facto authorities enjoy
Russian protection and influence.” Furthermore, he observes that “In each of
those cases, Russia intervened when it felt its influence was threatened.”
“… In Ukraine, once again,
Moscow has intervened to stop a former Soviet republic’s possible drift out of
Russia’s orbit and has justified its actions as a response to ethnic
persecution, the claims of which are exaggerated.”* Mankoff also acknowledges
that one reason the Russian government has regarded the Crimean peninsula as
being so strategically important is that it already hosted Russia’s Black Sea
fleet.
*NOTE: [Notice
Mankoff refers to the claims as “exaggerated” not false, an admission that
there is indeed “ethnic persecution” going on under the pro-Western government
in Kiev that deposed and replaced the elected Yanukovych regime. More on this
later.]
Mankoff
presents Putin’s plan to push economic and political integration with
post-Soviet states. For example, Putin wants to form a Eurasian Union, a new
supranational bloc directly modeled on the EU that he wants to launch in 2015.
Evidently, Belarus and Kazakhstan have already signed on; and Armenia,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have expressed interest. Without Ukraine joining,
this Eurasian bloc will not be capable of becoming a cultural and geopolitical
alternative to the West. Mankoff explains that the prospect of the Kiev government
signing an association agreement with the EU back in November would have meant
the permanent exclusion of Ukraine from
the Eurasian Union. It led Putin to offer President Yanukovych Russian loan
guarantees so that he would reject the deal with the EU. As Mankoff points out,
Yanukovych’s refusal to sign on with EU spawned the protests that toppled him.
And the interim Kiev government, loaded with pro Nazi fascists and put in by
the Western imperialists, signed the agreement with EU. This in turn has led to
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the current turmoil in Ukraine.
Clearly, even
according to Mankoff, these recent events in Ukraine were precipitated by the
U.S.-led western imperialist encroachments into this key former Soviet state on
Russia’s border.
The second
article was written by Walter Russell Mead, a Bard College professor and the
Editor-at-Large of The American Interest; he also provides the Foreign
Affairs book reviews on The United States. Of the
three articles by these U.S. imperialist apologists, Mead’s argument contains
the strongest rose-colored glasses by far. His article has the surprising
title, “The Return of Geopolitics.” For Mead argues that U.S. imperialism and
its western European imperialist allies, far from having a geopolitical agenda,
have been selflessly attempting to “construct a post-historical, win-win world.”
(!) According to Mead, Russia,
especially in seizing Crimea, has (along with China and Iran) undermined the
USA and EU both of whom “would rather move past geopolitical questions of
territory and military power and focus instead on ones of world order and
global governance.” “Indeed,” continues Mead, “since the end of the Cold War,
the most important objective of U.S. and EU foreign policy has been to shift international
relations away from zero-sum issues toward win-win ones.” (Is he writing these
things with a straight face?! What world has Mead been living in since 9-11-01,
during the unending Bush-Obama war of terror on the peoples of the world,
including in the USA?!)
The third
article is G. John Ikenberry’s “The Illusion of Geopolitics,” cited earlier in
this document. Its subtitle is “The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order.” As
the Foreign Affairs Book Reviewer for
Political and Legal books, it seems likely that Ikenberry was asked by Pete
Peterson, the billionaire publisher of Foreign
Affairs, to write an article to provide a
reassuring counterbalance to what Ikenberry refers to as “Mead’s alarmism” in
response to Russia’s successful annexation of Crimea. Ikenberry delivers.
He ridicules
Mead’s thesis that since the end of the Cold War, “the United States has
ignored geopolitical issues involving territory and spheres of influence and
instead adopted a Pollyannaish emphasis on building the global order.” Exposing
the “false dichotomy” that Mead makes between issues of global order and
geopolitical conflict, Ikenberry reveals the fact that, “the construction of a
U.S.-led global order did not begin with the end of the Cold War; it won the
Cold War.” (page 81)
Like Mankoff
and Mead (as well as The Economist writers), Ikenberry is an imperialist apologist. He claims that,
in the post WWII period, geopolitics and order building converged and that,
“with some important exceptions, such as Vietnam, the United States has
embraced postimperial principles.”(!) (My emphasis) He finds no contradiction between his
assertion, on the one hand, that U.S. “power is still unrivalled” based on its
far reaching military presence and, on the other, the U.S. Empire’s allegedly
“postimperial principles.” To this end, he cites the fact that “Washington and
its allies account for more than 75 percent of global military spending”(page
87) and that “the United States boasts military partnerships with more than 60
countries, whereas Russia counts eight formal allies and China has just one
(North Korea).”(page 82)
But Ikenberry’s
biggest reason for continued confidence in U.S.-led imperialism, even in the
aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is the fact that “China and Russia
have become deeply integrated into the existing international order. They are
both permanent members of the UN Security Council, with veto rights, and they
both participate actively in the World Trade Organization, The International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G-20. They are geopolitical insiders,
sitting at all the high tables of global governance.” (page 88)
Ikenberry
concludes that China and Russia “wish to enhance their positions within the
system, but they are not trying to replace it.” (page 89)
***
- Russia’s Putin as a Stooge for U.S. Imperialism-
Less than nine
months ago, Vladimir Putin politically rescued U.S. imperialist chieftain Obama
from the corner into which he had painted himself in a build-up to a major U.S.
imperialist war against the Syrian Regime! As I pointed out at the time, “Had
Congress voted on a bill to authorize an attack on Syria in the days
immediately following the President’s September 10th speech, there
is no doubt that the bill would have been defeated in the U.S. House and in all
likelihood in the Senate as well. Reflecting the current anti-war mood and will
of the people, Congress would have represented a formidable, democratic opposition
to an unjust imperialist war.” (“Obama: Drum Major for Imperialist War,” Ray O’Light Newsletter #80, September-October 2013)
There seemed to
be no way out for Obama until he and Putin met secretly in Moscow during the
G-20 Summit just ahead of the scheduled speech.* Putin and Obama met and
“agreed to cooperate with each other on an effort to take from the Syrian
government and ‘secure’ the Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. Putin’s cooperation with Obama immediately allowed U.S.
imperialism to break out of its international isolation on Syria.” (ibid., emphasis in
original)
*NOTE: [Obama
had declared to the world that he would not meet with Putin during the Moscow Summit to protest Russia’s
harboring of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.]
In the days that
followed, Putin was crucial to the successful efforts to get the Assad Regime
in Syria to agree to get rid of its chemical weapons stockpiles and even
extended this major deal with Obama and U.S. imperialism to include cooperation
from the Iranian regime.*
*NOTE: [Additonally,
Ikenberry refers to the fact that U.S. imperialism had been successful in
making Iran “the target of the strongest international sanctions regime ever
assembled, with help from China and Russia.” (opus cit., page 87, my emphasis)]
Putin must have
been stunned when he realized, so soon thereafter, that Obama and the U.S.-led
major imperialist powers of Western Europe had convinced the corrupt Yanukovych
Regime in Ukraine to move decisively into the European Union orbit. This is the
provocation that led Putin to provide loan guarantees for Ukraine that led
Yanukovych to opt to move closer to Russia. This in turn led to the
western-inspired “street demonstrations” that led to the ouster of Yanukovych
by Ukrainian fascist elements around the Svoboda party and the Right Sector.
Among the first actions of the rump Rada or parliament were to terminate the
official status of Russian and Greek as minority languages, rescinding the
Crimea’s autonomy and outlawing the Ukrainian Communist Party. The new
unelected pro-western and chauvinistic government in Kiev thus scared the
Russian-speaking enclaves throughout eastern Ukraine and especially the people
on the Crimean Peninsula who rushed into the embrace of Putin’s Russia.*
*NOTE: [The one humorous aspect to this serious situation was the
spectacle of Barack Obama, still wrapped in his wretched and tattered costume
of “U.S. Democracy,” trying to explain to the peoples of the world why the vote
by the overwhelming majority of the Crimean people to become part of Russia
should be considered “illegitimate.”]
It is no
wonder, too, that imperialist apologists like Walter Russell Mead and The Economist writers are extremely
worried about how quickly and decisively the Putin government ceased
functioning as a stooge for U.S. imperialism (at least for the moment) and made
the bold move of annexing Crimea. And this has led to a general uprising of
Russian speakers throughout Ukraine that Putin is trying to help the U.S.-led
imperialists to contain!
-The Contradiction Among the Imperialist Countries and Groupings-
Comrade Lenin
taught that, along with the contradiction between labor and capital and the
contradiction between the hundreds of millions (now billions) of colonial and
dependent peoples of the world and the handful of “civilized” (i.e. bestial)
oppressor nations or “great powers,” the other fundamental contradiction
plaguing imperialism as the last, dying stage of capitalism is the
contradiction between and among the imperialist powers and groupings
themselves.
The brief
period of time between Putin’s rescue of Obama on Syria and Obama’s and western
imperialism’s attempt to further isolate Russia economically and militarily by
removing Ukraine from its orbit underscores the fact that this fundamental
contradiction is an objective phenomenon. Russian and U.S. imperialism are partner-rivals. U.S.-led western
imperialism, just like Russian imperialism is motivated by the constant need
for maximum private profit. It is a fundamental weakness of the
political-economic system of imperialism that cannot be wished away or signed
away by treaties and other paper promises. Regarding
Ukraine, we can hear Obama saying to Putin: “Nothing personal; it’s just
business.” And, regarding Crimea, we now hear Putin saying to Obama: “Nothing
personal; it’s just business.”
The Russian
oligarchs have their own interests that have conflicted and will, in the
future, conflict even more sharply with the interests of Wall Street finance
capital. When Putin or other political representatives of the Russian monopoly
capitalist class feel sufficiently threatened or find the opportunity/need to
struggle against U.S. imperialism they will do so by whatever means are at
hand. Economic, political and military blocs have been formed and will continue
to be formed until such a time when a major war will break out so as to settle
on a new redivision of the world or until the international working class leads
humanity in putting an end to imperialist war and plunder and human
exploitation entirely.
***
CONCLUSION: For
now, the U.S.-led imperialist bloc is still the most belligerent and violent
bloc. It remains the main danger of new wars of all kinds. The working class
and oppressed peoples in the USA as well as the tiny U.S. revolutionary
vanguard have a special responsibility to oppose “our own” imperialists in
Crimea and Ukraine and in so many other countries around the world.
Down
with U.S.-led Imperialism Main Source of
War and Terror!
For
A Soviet Socialist World!
EDITOR'S NOTE:
CINDY SHEEHAN'S SOAPBOX RESPECTS A WIDE RANGE OF VIEWS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH. GUEST ARTICLES MAY, OR MAY NOT, (BUT PROBABLY DO) COMPLETELY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF CINDY SHEEHAN or CINDY SHEEHAN'S SOAPBOX AND COMMENTS/DISCUSSION ARE WELCOMED AND ENCOURAGED.
Cindy Sheehan for Governor End Poverty in California