By Phil Mirzoev, May 17/2022
THE GOAL OF RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR FOR THE US: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE!
Amidst all the emotional razzle-dazzle going on around the war in Ukraine, whipped up by propaganda on all sides of this conflict, even for those, who manage to keep a clear mind and good rational understanding of what is really going on in terms of the parties to, motivations behind and scale of this Russian-Ukrainian war, it's easy to forget or miss some of the most important questions in all this tragic story.
Before anything else, I have to clarify that all the inferred parts of the article present my personal opinions, apart from those that explicitly refer to some other persons or common knowledge or widely held prevailing assumptions.
I also have to clarify that neither the object of my analysis nor the motives have anything to do with trying to make any moral justifications for Russia or Ukraine or anyone else for that matter. Nor do I in anyway diminish the horrible depth of suffering that the Ukrainian people are going through because of this proxy-war, and personally I hope and pray that this war will end as soon as possible with as few lives lost as possible. This war in theory was preventable many times during the past decade, and can be stopped even now, if it wasn't for the fact that all the parties who have conditioned and triggered this war seem to have very little desire to do so.
I myself have always been and am a big proponent of strong, independent, secure and democratic Ukraine and this wish of mine for the Ukraine can only be matched by my confidence that the membership in or informal alliance with NATO was and is (and will be) the most disastrous thing that could only happen to Ukraine and the most effective recipe of how to prevent Ukraine from achieving all of those.
But these topics don't really belong in the present discussion and analysis.
First, the bottom line upfront, and after that I will try to explain the situation more in detail.
1. The kinetic war between Russia and Ukraine is a secondary proxy-war for the war that has been started between the West and Russia, and this main war has been started by the collective West where the collective West is represented, guided and involved into this war specifically by the Anglo-West, mostly the US and the UK. The proxy war between Russia and Ukraine was as an enabler of the war.
2. The incremental preparation and conditioning of Ukraine and its internal and external policies to make the Russian-Ukrainian war possible was started around 10 years ago, but entered the most intensive development phase in 2013-2014. As is mentioned about, it this whole project was built in steps mostly by the US in order to be able to start the war between the whole collective West and Russia.
3. The immediate aim of this war, in the US calculus, has nothing to do directly with Russia or Ukraine for that matter, but it has everything to do with Europe. This war has nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia and everything to do with Europe within the context of its relationship with and role within the US empire. The US aim is to “reboot” its relationship with Europe and return the latter to the same status of obedience and dependence to the requirements of the US international policies as the one Europe observed during the Cold War. The US wants to turn time back and return to the sweet seventies in its relationship with and power over Europe.
4. The only way how US it could do in our day and age is to start a war within Europe, right on the borders of the EU, stirring all the old fears and collective mental trauma of Europe, scaring Europe into the old pliant, dependent and obedient state like during the Cold War.
5. The US critically wanted this “reboot” of its relations with Europe because the more fundamental geopolitical goal of the US is to start the project Cold War II, but not with Russia, which is not a major geopolitical or economic competitor of the US, but with China. This Cold War II is a global imperial project. The biggest problem for the US was impossibility to start a new Cold War without getting on board Europe, and there was no way how Europe would agree to get involved in Cold War II with China out of its own free will if things hadn't changed. To solve this, the US needed a war in Europe, and the “reboot” of its relationship format with Europe first.
6. The possible price for that is that the US and the West (involved by the US into its imperial project Cold War II) will have to fight this war on two fronts, which is against both China and Russia as allies, but the US is ready to pay this premium, for there aren't many alternatives from its perspective.
7. The US, unlike the rest of the world, needs Cold War II because the US is a global empire and as a global empire it cannot exist without a war, not just a war, but a global war, since empires in their very genesis, in their pulse and breath, cannot exist without war – the inner mechanics of empires are based on war. The moment war stops empires fall into decay and die internally and externally. The US started to feel this existential threat as a empire (not as a nation or a country but as an empire) in the 21st century, and very serious symptoms appeared of its dilapidation and regression on economic, political, social front, and in the form of the runaway corruption and moral crisis inside the US. This was because the project of global “war on terror” never succeeded in the replacement of Cold War, which ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vacuum that formed after the end of Cold War started to erode the US empire both from the inside and outside, and the “reboot” of the US as an empire seemed to be emphatically impossible without an equivalent replacement of the Cold War I with the Cold War II, where the America's pursuit of the latter imperatively required to use China as the main global “enemy”. For that the US had to try to “reboot” Europe.
Now I will try to address all the above points in detail.
One of those questions, and, in my opinion, the most impost important one is: “WHY did the US need a war with Russia when it's most important strategic competitor is China and when it's obvious that a war with Russia would create what goes against all common sense and all the precepts of the American geopolitical textbooks and experience, namely the rule of never allowing Russia and China to combine, form a real economic and political union that could control most of Eurasia?”
By war hereinafter is meant not just a narrow type of kinetic war but geopolitical war which usually includes informational/propaganda war, trade war, technological war, economic war, political war etc., proxy military war, and, only in some cases, direct military war (something that still very many people mean by war – a stereotype from those old days when direct military action was a method much more common and effective to wage wars between countries and blocks than the methods used today).
Before giving my answer to the above key question, which I dare to think is overall correct or close to the truth, I have to make a couple points/premises and caveats in order not to distract with all these questions those to whom at this stage this whole discussion and context will not make any sense and wouldn't help in the least bit even in starting to understand what's going on.
1. What is going on around the situation between Russia and Ukraine right now is a WAR between the collective West and Russia. The collective West in the context of this war is “collective” to the extent that the West here is geopolitically represented and guided by the leadership of the United States, or, a bit broader, by the Anglo-West with its core consisting of the US/UK alliance. So is the NATO which is the main organizational, technical and political vehicle of this US leadership.
This is not to mean that the “collective” West may not stop being collective at a certain point in future in relation to this war and geopolitical motives, after which the US or Anglo-West may still continue to collectively wage this war and support the agenda behind it, but it is to mean that at the start of this war and at the time of writing the whole West acts collectively, even though the European West acts as a dependent submissive party to its leader Anglo-West, and even more narrowly the United States.
The kinetic war going on in Ukraine is a proxy war in military terms between the collective West and Russia, thus it doesn't include direct confrontation between the NATO military contingents and those of Russia. The main reason for that is the mutually assured nuclear destruction of both parties – West and Russia – and some other high risks making such a kinetic war an undertaking not worth it for both. This proxy war is supported by direct supplies of arms, military advice, intelligence, economic support for military needs and so on and so forth. This is a proxy war.
The other part of the war is the economic war (the so called “sanctions” which are of course nothing to do with the usual “sanctions” as a certain type of relationship, moral and political stance and demonstration, but a full scale package of measures designed and directed at the destruction of Russian economy to the level causing stagnation and regression of the whole country, its key institutions and its State), propaganda and ideological war, political war (war of alliances), technological war.
Those who still don't understand and haven't started to understand this part of the reality – that what is going has very little to do with Ukraine and Russia and everything to do with the US and Russia – had better not spent any more of their time reading this and many other works trying to identify some underlying causes of the ongoing global crisis, the monumental collision of the tectonic plates of the geopolitical and economic global order one of the visible stress points of which has manifested itself in Ukraine.
2. This war hasn't been something unexpected but the countdown to it started as early as 2008 (some would argue even earlier) and shifted into the top gear in 2014. For those who want to understand the geopolitical context and intermediate causes of this countdown from the real academic perspective, nothing can be better than spending 1 hour on this brilliant lecture given in 2015 at the University of Chicago by one of the most brilliant American scholars of our times in geopolitical history Dr. John Mearsheimer, where he predicted the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia with the accuracy of a Swiss watch – predicted it without even any intention of doing so because this prediction wasn't even the main goal of his lecture but flowed naturally from his acute analysis of the Western policies in relation to Russia and their obvious and inevitable expected consequences were those policies here to stay (and they did).
For those who are not acquainted with the history of the question it saves a lot of time in basically digging into the historical process and understanding the reality of what has really been going on since at least 2008 between the West and Russia if one goes and acquaint oneself with all these realities through listening to the aforementioned lecture for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&t=2s
In the interest of time, most of the premises and iron-clad perquisites of this war that Mearsheimer mentioned in that lecture (but also of course in his more fundamental academic works on this topic for those who are interested), and that made this war inevitable, I will mention with direct reference to his name, even though, of course, he is not the only scholar and academic who clearly understood and explained all those realities.
Dr. Mearsheimer and many other academic thinkers do not answer the question of why would the West, specifically the US, would need a war with Russia ahead of many other things that could obviously suffer from this war against its own interests. Mearsheimer explains with lucid clarity what exactly the US has been doing and why what it has been doing has led to what it's led to, but he doesn't explain why the US has been doing it in the first place from the motivational perspective.
Mearsheimer clearly showed more than 7 years ago that the long-term policies of the US vis-a-vis Russia, realized through using Ukraine, would inevitably lead to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine with huge negative consequences for the latter, Europe and, possibly, a pretty heavy price for the US itself.
Yet Mearsheimer basically was a critic of those Western policies who explicitly considered them a mistake, a self-damaging mistaken strategy. At the same time Mearsheimer, at least implicitly, posited that this “mistake” came out of either lack of understanding by Washington of what it was doing (that Washington didn't expect that its policy would lead to a war) or because Washington somehow didn't understand full well what was good and what was bad geopolitically to the US in the 21st century, and what were the main challenges to the US in this day and age (e.g. that this war would make one more unnecessary enemy and make China an enemy on steroids because of its alliance with Russia due to the US policies). Neither of these assumptions look tenable to me.
There is little ground to believe that Washington didn't understand most of those realities that Mearsheimer clarified, and there's every reason to believe that Washington had a very clear picture of what its policies meant in terms of triggering war between West and Russia throwing Russia into the open arms of China and quite likely creating a gigantic monster – the alliance of those two – controlling most of Eurasia.
The question is: WHY did the US continue with such “maniacal perseverance” to stick to the policy that potentially augmented both: the number of its enemies and their strength, pushing Russia and China into the open arms of each other, and start a war in a region that is of zero strategic interest to the US but not a free ride in terms of the costs?!
This means uniting the two neighboring giants that are in so many regards look like a match made in heaven as it is, even without any external effort to marry them: one is a production powerhouse of the world and the other – Russia – is the resource and energy powerhouse of the world to feed all the mega-industrial (and military) machine of the first one.
It is especially true seeing as Russia's turn to the East and tremendous reorientation of its foreign policy and economy towards China started as early as in 2014, after the first Ukrainian crisis and Ukraine's loss of land to Russia; yet Russia's pivoting to the East wasn't totally irreversible, giving plenty of time to the West to correct its policies.
Mearsheimer doesn't answer this question – why the US needs a war with Russia – he just explicitly assumes that Washington was so silly and blind in its analysis and policies that it couldn't understand those truths, which, in my view, cannot be reasonably taken as the most likely scenario.
These are the premises rightly outlined by Dr. Mearsheimer that lead to this war as inevitably as day follows night:
A) NATO started to expand eastward towards Russian borders in the 21st century (Baltic countries, Poland), and then in 2008 year the promise was given to Georgia and Ukraine to be included in NATO.
B) Not only didn't Russia like these NATO expansion steps but it perceived them as an existential threat. Russian attitude to the idea of NATO expansion have been reiterated by Russia since as early as 2007 in the clearest form and multiple times.
C) Russia, because of the political and economic inertia caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, had to digest the first wave of NATO expansion (Poland and the Baltic States), especially taking into account the small population and economy size of the Baltic countries and that Poland isn't a country directly bordering on Russia.
But Russia drew the absolute red line on any further NATO expansion towards its borders in 2007, and the potential admission of Georgia, and even more so, Ukraine, was seen by Russia as an absolute existential threat. After both those countries were given the promise of becoming members of NATO in April 2008, in August 2008 Georgia was invaded by Russia.
A NATO friendly and US friendly leadership of Georgia at that time coupled with the active process of the preparation and integration of Georgia militarily into the NATO format before formally admitting it was more than enough make Russia deal with Georgia militarily: after the Russian invasion in August 2008 rarely does anybody even mention nowadays Georgia as a NATO candidate or even ally (it's worthy of note that Georgia before the Russian invasion actually hosted an American military base and contingent in its territory which wasn't there just for some side ancillary purposes of the US).
At the same time, Georgian example only adds hard evidence to the fact that politically Russia had never been motivated to occupy or directly control Georgia or create any puppet loyal regime there. In fact, none of the administrations that have been in power in Georgia since the Russian invasion in 2008 have been pro-Russian, no has Russia ever exhibited any anxiety about it.
In short, Moscow's position was very straightforward and supported by its actions: “We don't care how you govern yourself inside, what you think of us, what your international policies are – you are a totally free and sovereign country and can do whatever you please. The only thing that we do care about is your potential membership in NATO as a supranational entity that can determine the presence of non-Georgian military force and weapons far beyond the boundaries of Georgia as its own independent nation-state, far beyond its sovereignty.
D) Mearsheimer, as a prominent champion of the realist school of thought, said that it is irrelevant whether NATO, as could be measured by some imaginary absolute yard-stick of truth, really posed or could pose any existential danger to Russia and its State. Suffice it to say that Russia believed so and there's all the evidence to see that this belief wasn't something artificial or insincere or unexpected in Russia's frame of reference.
In its turn, the frame of reference of the US and its perceptions aren't so different from those of Russia in regard to the presence of any non-friendly military alliances close to the US borders haven't changed either: it is indeed absolutely unthinkable up to this day that any remote power should dare to co-opt any of the US neighbors into a significant military alliance and supply that neighbor with sophisticated military infrastructure, equipment and weaponry right on the US border without the immediate interference of the US – military one if need be – to eliminate this intrusion into what the US considers to be its sphere of influence and regional security (which happens to be the whole Western hemisphere and spreads much further than just the national borders of the US, by the way, as per the Monroe doctrine, which continues to be active).
E) On top of what Dr. Mearsheimer said regarding the legitimacy of Russian concerns vis-a-vis NATO, I'd add that the “perceptions” of Russia are more than justified on the objective side too.
Indeed, there has been lots of really silly rhetoric to the effect that “NATO is a defensive alliance” - this, of course, can't be asserted in any serious rational discussion.
Apart from the fact that starting with Yugoslavia then getting involved in Afghanistan, Libya etc NATO, even from a purely formal standpoint, has multiple times broken its own “defensive” doctrine in the last three decades, specifically in the context of Russia, NATO by definition cannot be considered as only a “defensive” and non-threatening entity, taking into consideration the prevalent ownership of NATO by the US and UK and the nuclear missiles of the the both countries being “defensively” aimed at all the Russian cities day and night – the context of nuclear antagonism has never formally gone away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, those missiles have never been re-aimed in any other direction, and the nuclear antagonistic relationship has never been and is not based on any meaningful notion of “defensiveness”, but on the notion of the balance of power and mutually guaranteed destruction.
In this sense, the approach of the NATO infrastructure to the Russian borders is nothing more than a predictable shift of this balance of nuclear power away from the point of equilibrium, giving all the rational grounds to the party more exposed (Russia in this case) to worry about its own defense.
It's worth mentioning too that the aforesaid outright breaches by NATO of its own declared creed of being a “purely defensive” alliance in various parts of the world not only demonstrate once more that this supranational military entity cannot be considered by Russia as “defensive” or safe and “innocuous”, but that on the whole it cannot be rationally posited to be such by the rest of the world insofar as those countries are concerned that aren't formal or informal affiliates of NATO.
F). The West, the US in particular, continued to support the NATO partnership, liaison and cooperation with the Ukraine regime (formal and/or informal) after the coup d'état in 2014 supported by the US – the regime change. Moreover, within the context of the regime change and the nature of the new regime in terms of its relationship with Russia and ethnically Russian regions of Ukraine (which collectively can be called Donbas) the US politically and economically supported the creation and sustainable development of the conditions that predictably led to the arising of ethnic conflict and then, basically, a civil war inside Ukraine (this civil war started in 2014 and has never stopped until this moment).
The US, as well as anybody else, knew full well, that such an ethnic conflict in its own right wouldn't leave too much choice to Russia, just as it wouldn't to any other European country in a similar situation (especially within ethnic aspect of Europe's history, its borders, relations, conflicts and sensibilities), other than to intervene militarily, and if need be, directly.
The inevitability of intervening directly on the part of Russia from the point of view of protecting Donbas – the region with the population majority of ethnic Russian – continued to grow by the day as of 2014, in direct proportion to the US effort of molding, training and arming the Ukrainian army and some paramilitary forces, like the so called “Azov” structure, and supporting the Ukrainian regime in its effort to conquest Donbas and take its territory back in the course of the civil war, in which the ethnically Russian Donbas was a defending party.
It is absolutely obvious, be it from a purely military or political viewpoint, that had Russia really desired to invade Ukraine for any motives other than the above ones (i.d. protection of the ethnically Russian region of Donbas and Ukraine's further military alliance with NATO) it would have done so much earlier, in fact, it would have done so as far back as in 2014, for it clearly would have been much less costly to Moscow at that time as opposed to waiting for 8 years for Ukraine to build up, train and fortify its army with the real battle experience in Donbas.
E) The last, but not least, aspect that must be mentioned regarding the genesis of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine is something that Mearsheimer doesn't discuss in depth, namely the rationale of democracy. This should be clarified: Ukraine has never been a true democracy after gaining its independence in 1991, it had been an oligarchy all along before 2014, something that, it seems, wasn't denied by Ukrainian elites and thinkers themselves.
The situation got only worse after 2014 when the character of the Ukrainian oligarchy started to become less and less tolerable and more and more radical towards the political opponents (be it MPs or journalists or activists) of those oligarchs who held the power and who stuck to the nationalist militant agenda in regard to the possible normalization of the Donbas conflict – the nationalist agenda that was totally supported by the US.
In simple words, the US has never cared about democracy or any human rights aspects of Ukraine, and in fact both of those aspects of the Ukrainian regime – a regime that had evolved with the total support and influence of the US – has deteriorated abysmally even as compared to what the state of affairs was before the events of 2014.
Nor has the US cared one iota about the corruption in Ukraine. If anything, the corruption went from strength to strength after 2014, and the weakness of the state institutions and elites that was an expected product of this corruption meant only one thing to the US: more easiness to influence Ukraine's policies and a more straight course of Ukraine towards creating conditions for Moscow's direct interference: Ukraine's NATO-related militarization on the one hand and its effort to conquest Donbas militarily on the other hand.
It follows pretty clearly from all the above realities that the US wanted this war to happen and deliberately created and promoted conditions for this war to happen, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, human rights or the sovereignty of Ukraine for that matter, which, ironically, vanished after the events of 2014 supported and desired by the US so much, for after the regime change in 2014 the political dependence of the Ukraine on the external actors in the questions of Ukraine's external relations and policies became much higher than ever before in the 21st century – the main defining force behind Ukrainian foreign policies and aspiration started to be not the Ukrainian sovereign decisions and choices but those made across the Atlantic.
Mearsheimer also points out the very obvious fact that neither Ukraine, nor even Russia per se, are of great economic significance to the US. To put it simply, Ukraine in itself doesn't present any interest to the United States, nor is Russia – they aren't big economies, they aren't technologically competitive, they aren't military threats, they aren't economic or significantly military inconveniences to the US interests in other regions of the world. However, as Mearsheimer rightly points out Russia per se, if considered separately, could potentially be useful to the US on many issues that actually are of significance to the US, including the confrontation with China, if the US befriended Russia.
It follows that in many respects what the US did in Ukraine looks like shooting itself in the foot if, as
Dr. Mearsheimer implicitly assumes, the US made a mistake in its understanding of the consequences of its policies or the unimportance of Ukraine or Russia per se to its real agenda in the world (China being the biggest item on the US plate). However, as I mentioned earlier, it's really unreasonable and arbitrary to assume that Washington didn't understand some rather trivial things that would lead to some none too trivial consequences to the US and Europe.
Mearsheimer clearly shows that the policies of the US predictably and obviously led to the escalation of tension between Russia and Ukraine, and the Russian invasion, which, in its turn, was just an excuse or a designed trigger to start a war on Russia – war between the West and Russia. The question Mearsheimer not only hasn't answered but never once asked is: “WHY DOES THE US NEED THIS WAR ON RUSSIA?”, especially if this war obviously brings to bear so many indirect costs on the US.
Well, the answer to this question lies in the nature of the US – of what the US became in the 20th century. The US is an global EMPIRE, period. And this in itself is not something new or something argued even inside the US (at times it is actually bragged about or taken pride in among the US top politicians, scholars and other parts of the American elites).
Not only that, but the public discourse within this context often revolves around the question whether the US is an empire in decline, with many holding the view that it is.
Whether the US is a declining empire or not may bear on the question of the war with Russia but rather tangentially. A more important factor is that the US is not just an empire but it is a global empire.
Because the US is an empire, and as long as it is still an empire, it has some absolutely intrinsic and indelible mechanisms/forces natural to any empire, and without the work of which any empire just cease functioning and stops being an empire.
One of these mechanisms is empire's existential dependence on war and expansion. Again, war, as was mentioned before, in its broadest definition means war conducted by any methods: economic, informational war, ideological and political war etc.
The whole social moral tissue of an empire, morale and solidarity and social trust in its society, its economics, its politics and political culture, the relationship between different strata of the society, the most fundamental collective notion of “WE” as a society and its self-reflection existentially depends on war and expansion – a very strong externalization many socio-economic issues is necessary for an empire. The economy of an empire also structurally depends on war and expansion: it needs special privileged external export markets, external markets of labor force, external privileged import markets (especially for the privileged access to resources and energy). Empire is all about making the internal critically dependent the external, and because this dependence grows and real competitiveness drops, also grows the insatiable demand for even more external spheres of influence.
War is the main spring of the most vital social, political and economic processes in an empire, war is the bone and blood of any empire. War as a state, war as a process, war as an idea, war as a self-reflection of the collective consciousness of the society in the mirror of itself, war as a duty, war as a source of social trust, pride, value, self-esteem and solidarity.
One of the deepest features of any empire is that its most intimate and life-sustaining INTERNAL processes always critically depend on the EXTERNAL processes. The INSIDE of empires is always always hostage to the OUTSIDE of empires. In simple terms, they are like bubbles that start to collapse the moment they stop to expand (which is one of the main reasons why empires inevitably come to their natural death as empires relatively quickly by historical standards). The very dialectics of empires are such that they are condemned to their collapse the moment they are born because they are critically dependent on expansion which can never be eternal.
And the opposite is true, once the mechanism of the continuous expansion, feeding upon itself, starts spinning the wheels, and its gears start losing traction, all hell suddenly breaks loose in an empire's economy, society, ethical tissue and politics: humongous corruption starts devouring inside out the whole political system of the empire, social and economic institutions (both state and private and everything in between); the institution of citizenship, the civil loyalty and, more generally, the social solidarity and trust start going south precipitately; conflicts and feuds between different classes and layers of the society go rampant, leading to all kinds of “smoldering civil wars”, and, sometimes, leading to the real civil wars, which are the usual companions of the decay phase of any empire.
Because deep vacuum is formed when the main “glue” of the society and its solidarity – the war and expansion beyond the borders of the empire - starts to dry out, different classes and layers of the society start to fill this vacuum with all manner of various mutually conflicting ideas, identities and self-reflections of the collective “WE” (very often, but not always, based on ethnic, national and other characteristics), which leads to the rupture of the previously cohesive moral and social fabric, naturally giving rise to even higher levels of corruption and social strife in a positive feedback loop. Fragmentation takes place.
For a global empire, not least, it also leads to the weakening of the bondage between the core of the empire and its international allies, suzerains, client states, colonies and quasi-colonies – all of those external loyal countries and blocks that, on the one hand, are parts of the empire, and, on the other hand, its agents. Those external loyal parts start to lose any basis of duty and loyalty to the core part, the sense of common goal and interest, when they see that, by all appearances, the very need for war – be it cold or hot or warm – has dissipated. The weakening support of the empire by its external client-states starts to weaken, and, on the other hand, inside those client-states the focus starts to shift to their internal problems and their own new (or old-forgotten) basis for their collective identity and trust inside their own nations and societies.
Because of the above processes, THE RISE OF NATIONALISM is often, though not always, a typical harbinger and symptom of the decay of an empire – the rise of nationalism both in the core part of the empire and in its external parts and client-states.
War of expansion for an empire is a “magnetic field” that “artificially” stabilizes and directs all the elements of the society like particles of metal dust placed over a paper sheet over a magnet; war is a yard-stick and source of consolidating energy for the society of empire all in one, and the absence of expansion, when prolonged enough, is a death warrant to it.
When an empire collapses and ceases to exist, which in itself is always a very painful process in view of the aforementioned inevitable regression processes, a new social and political order appears with time, but before that a prolonged period of depression and dilapidation follows, because it takes a significant amount of time to form new basis for moral and societal, hence political and economical, cohesion. Sometimes collapses of empires lead to the geopolitical fragmentation of the core part of the former empire.
Now, to return to the US and its war on Russia, a serious problem arose for the US when the Cold War ended at the end of the 1980s: one of the main “fuel tanks” of the US war machine run empty. The Cold War was a global war – exactly what was needed to satisfy the core requirement of the US as a global empire in order for this empire to exist and function normally. It was a global war of ideologies, moral systems of values, economic models – of everything. That real global war ended.
After a series of various international, yet not global, wars, like the one in Yugoslavia, the first war in Iraq and suchlike in the 1990s, the US came up with a new project of the global war on terrorism in the beginning of 2000s as a replacement to fill the gap formed by the end of the Cold War. There was nothing really new about terrorism and its threats in the world, and nothing really existentially important on the security side for the US or the West on the whole for that matter.
Even less did this so-called war on terror deserve any global scale and status – to many of those who aren't into history and geopolitical mechanics this whole war on terror project may have appeared “artificial” and driven by some “special anxiety” of the US to seek and create a war in order to fight it, rather than fight a war in order to put an end to it. I wouldn't be surprised if many of my readers, even those living in the US, had this gut feeling at the start of the 21st century – the artificiality of the so-called “global war on terror”.
If so, your gut feeling didn't deceive you. One of the biggest reasons, if not the single biggest one, behind the US project of “war on terror” was the need to fill the vacuum formed by the end of the Cold War and create some other type of global war in which not only the US but all its allies and loyal parties would be involved.
Unfortunately, from the standpoint of the imperial logic of the US, this “war on terror” didn't work for its intended purpose: it had never been an adequate replacement for a real global war, it had never inspired the same imperative feeling of support and solidarity neither in the American society nor in its European allies on a prolonged basis.
Apart from the fact that this “war on terror” wasn't perceived as a real war or any form of expansion, in fact it provoked in large swathes of the US and, even more so, European society distrust and even cynicism, for it gave to many people enough cause to perceive this “war” as a non-authentic “cartoon war” that had been organized or “orchestrated” for corrupt self-serving reasons that benefited a very narrow section of the elites. In simple words, it just didn't work for the purposes of global war in the sense of supporting the engine of the empire running normally; this “cartoon war” lacked authenticity and moral legitimacy in the eyes of both: the external clients of the US empire and the US society itself.
The vacuum formed after the end of the Cold War didn't away, and the forces that glue the US global empire together and that are dependent on a global war have started to weaken. Europe, who was an affiliated beneficiary and dependent part of the US empire in the time of Cold War, started to feel increasingly less bound by any debt to the US for anything, looking towards its own future and its own economic and diplomatic relations with other countries and parts of the world, including its eastern neighbor Russia and emerging economic giants like China. On the other hand, Afghanistan and Iraq wars, that were part of the war on terror, didn't do anything but predictably created a serious burden for Europe, at which point the latter just stopped being a beneficiary of the US imperial project, or at least a recipient of some form of compensation for its loyalty and involvment.
In the meantime all the aforementioned symptoms of decay of a global empire started to crop up like blisters on the skin of the American social and political body.
Corruption (not in the narrow legal sense, of course, but in its broadest definition) has started to spread like a wild fire in the US where the financial self-serving interests – private and collective – of the governmental, political and corporate (especially oligopolic) institutions and agencies, and their interest groups have started to be the main driving force behind the US policies, both internally and externally, as opposed to the collective interests of the country, its real security, social and economic prosperity.
The rapid decline in the conditions of really free and competitive market, suffocated by the rampant monopolization/oligopolization of the US economy in consequence of the increasing political lobbying power of the big corporations in financial, high tech, pharmaceutical, energy and transportation domains is a direct result of the above corruption caused by the empire-in-decline syndrome.
This along with other factors contributes massively to the loss of the overall competitiveness of the US economy and to the absolutely debilitating runaway income disparity growth, hence, inequality in the standard of living between different strata of the society, which is not explained or justified by any real free market conditions or by individual abilities and entrepreneurial talents of people. The latter consequence contributes massively to the demoralization and the social crisis of trust, morals and values in the US politics and society.
Another natural satellite of these empire decadence processes in the US is, for all to see, the aforementioned rupture of the social and cultural fabric and its cohesion: the unstoppable and accelerating crisis of social trust, of social moral values and fragmentation of identities of various strata of society manifesting itself par excellence in the so-called cultural wars that are increasingly taking form of a non-kinetic smoldering civil war (which hopefully isn't going to become a kinetic one).
The loss of the moral and political reputation, and trust by the US beyond its borders, both among its imperial dependent allies and developing countries, is yet another typical companion of the crumbling empire syndrome.
These and a number of other really bad signs have been known and felt, consciously or subconsciously, by the US elites, and a subconscious, or conscious and calculated search for a new A) legitimate and B) global war has been pursued by the US hectically at least for the past 15 years as a means to breathe new life into the sputtering and coughing engine of the American empire, with a view to rebooting its economy and social cohesion, unifying its collective moral values, interests and goals. War, since the end of the WWII, when arguably the US did transform into an empire, has become as indispensable as air for the US society and economy to be able to breathe, survive and thrive.
The project “Cold War II” was started as a replacement for “Cold War I” in order to save the US as an empire.
The war with Russia per se wasn't a suitable candidate for Cold War II because it lacked both globality and legitimacy among the dependent partners, let alone the developing countries, who, unlike the former, were the main empire-parasitized areas. A new Cold War couldn't be a totally artificial construct that would lack any credibility among other countries and the American society, gullible as it is sometimes.
Russia didn't pose any significant military threat to the US, its economy and economic influence on the US was less than that of any big European country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor would Europe be interested in the economic price it would have to pay for a war with Russia, hence, it would be opposed to this project all the more for this reason; to add to that, Europe didn't have too much fear of Russia, with the exception of the Baltic states and Poland.
The above restriction only puts a second question mark over the question “Why did the US need to start a war with Russia?”
China, obviously, in the 21st century presents, probably, the only one possible candidate for the American project of Cold War II due to the size of its economy, military and its increasing global influence. Despite the enormous corruption of the whole military-industrial-intelligence complex of the US, and, arguably, a very serious loss of the professionalism and competence of their top cadre since the end of the Cold War, there are no grounds to assume that Washington didn't understand that. In other words, Washington did appoint China as its main target in creating the Cold War II and excuses for it – it did it probably earlier than 2010.
In this context, as Dr Mearsheimer rightly said, Russia could actually be useful to Washington as an ally, and Washington at least could try to build some bridge of mild friendship to Moscow and play some cards of common interest. This is especially true taking into account that Russia itself used to harbor an unjustifiably leery attitude to China as short a time as 20 years ago – likely on the strength of the Soviet legacy of “bad blood” between those two countries. Only Mearsheimer seems to imply that this was something that Washington didn't understand as well as he – Mearsheimer – did, whereas, in my view, there are no grounds to make such an arbitrary assumption: Washington most likely did understand that, and pretty well too.
Then what was the problem to the US with proceeding to “appoint” China “the main enemy of the world and all its nations” and starting the new Cold War II around it? This is something that Dr. Mearsheimer doesn't ask.
Well, the problem was Europe! Europe had no desire to start or support any global wars with China. To begin with, Europe had no particular interest in any new Cold Wars, let alone hot ones, and even less enthusiasm did it nourish about the idea of spoiling its relationship with China that had become the biggest trading partner of Europe – Europe, which unlike the US, is a very export-oriented economy. Politically Europe didn't have any security concerns regarding China either for the simple reason of China's being a geographically remote power from Europe's perspective, and with the range of its own interests encompassing mostly the Asia Pacific.
On the other hand, for the US it was unthinkable – outright impossible – to create a Cold War II not only without having Europe on board, but actually with risking losing Europe as its dependent imperial ally, or, worse yet, turning it into a somewhat unfriendly competitor! The US could not fulfill its “American Dream” of creating a new Cold War without getting Europe on board.
Perfectly understanding that China is the only candidate for an “ideal scapegoat” to be used in creating the Cold War II, America saw that the whole conundrum was how to get Europe on board, for after the collapse of both the Soviet Union and its “war on terror” project, the US leverage over Europe was becoming weaker and weaker whereas the European economy, its independence and its trade connectivity to other regions, not least that very China, was becoming stronger and stronger.
“How to make a time machine, hop in it and go back in time into the sweet seventies when Europe was “a senile and helpless old granny barely” that was still loved by its strong and ever-so-kind granddaughter America, and, therefore, taken care of by America and protected against a terrible gangster – the Soviet Union – under the condition of granny's proper obedience in the questions of all the international politico-economic affairs and good behavior?” – that was the biggest question for the US.
Well, once the problem is outlined well enough the solution often seems to be almost obvious: the only way how the US could do this magic time travel is to reopen the old mental wounds and deepest fears of Europe and TERRORIZE her into the old state of being a weak helpless party seeking “protection” or the “protection racket” of the United States in exchange of her proper obedience and payment of the political and economic price of supporting the US empire in whatever the latter asks her for – turning Europe into a kind of Stockholm syndrome victim would voluntarily cater to the needs of its own kidnapper.
To make it possible, all that was needed is to create a REAL MILITARY WAR inside Europe right on the border of the EU, preferably a war that would involve Russia, who is a nuclear superpower, so that Europe alone a priori couldn't have any serious control over or means of resolution to this war, and so that the only source of some sense of protection could be given by the dominating protective role of the US under the condition of the submissive obedience of Europe on all other fronts of the international affairs, not least its position on China (!).
After properly conditioning Europe and its imperial relationship with it, the US has its hands untied to open the main act of its play “Cold War III” - the global war with China. Now, the US has reasonable confidence that if it needs to decouple China from the West in terms of trade, currency, the compatibility of the technical standards etc, Europe will be do as it's told to do by its big “friend”.
In other words, the “Russian-Ukrainian” war has very little to do with either Ukraine or Russia, but it is all about Europe (!): this war was created by the US for the sake of Europe in order to condition its behavior and loyalty for another, much bigger war – Cold War III, the main “antihero” of which is going to be China.
To cap it all off, one could ask a perfectly logical question: will this American plan of getting Europe on board for its project Cold War II actually work?
My short answer is: “Most likely NO”. The general reason for that, in my view, is that this horse has already bolted out of the stable and it's too late to shut the door. The economic and the internal political price for Europe is going to be unsustainably high to support the increasingly risky Cold War II endeavors of its transatlantic “friend” in view of an enormous increase in the production power of not only China but a number of other developing countries.
Tremendous underestimation by the Western elites of the forces of nationalism both inside the West and in the rest of the world is another reason. The present war – between Russia and the West – threatens to destroy the EU (tearing it apart with the growing forces of nationalism fertilized by the economic toll) much faster than it is going to really undermine Russia, and this development, if it comes to this point, is not going to meet the US objective of getting Europe's support on its global imperial projects, but rather the opposite is likely to happen.
This “proxy-proxy war” between the West and Russia (a proxy war for another proxy war with China in future), in my view, has already put an end to the globalization in the form and shape we've known it before, and awakens the hitherto dormant beast of nationalism.
But at any rate, this question – whether or not the US attempt to involve Europe into the orbit of its imperial projects and global wars once again will work – deserves its own chapter and analysis in depth, which goes beyond the scope of the present topic.
The last but not least, it has to be added that even though this terrible war between Russia and Ukraine, desired and designed by the US through a very well thought-out series of steps, may not eventually meet the purpose for which it's been created, it is hard to call it a “mistake of judgment” on the part of the US. This is because there are probably no other alternatives that would give a chance to the US to resurrect its dying empire like a phoenix from the ashes. Thus even if in the US calculus there is a 20% chance that it might work, the US has all the rational reason, within the ruthless context of its goals, to try this plan. Simply put, the US just doesn't have too much to lose (unlike Europe and Ukraine and millions of their people who are going to suffer enormously).
Since, as history teaches us, for the States of the usual countries, let alone empires, it may take only a reasonable chance of success and improvement to provoke and support the ugliest wars (which is another name for a state-sponsored mass murder), one could imagine how little moral qualm an empire would have in starting a new war if that war don't seem to put too much direct burden on it and if a failure of the plan doesn't present any significant risk either in its calculus.
By Phil Mirzoev, May 17/2022
