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https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/05/goal-of-russian-ukrainian-war-for-us-it.html 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
