Does anyone know what the hell Joe Biden is doing in Ukraine? Americans must feel like a high school substitute teacher. America turns its back for five minutes after having won the Cold War, and Joe Biden has restarted it in the back row. No address to the nation, no white papers, just “Putin attacked Ukraine and it is an existential threat we must respond to.” Didn’t we used to vote on this kind of thing?

Engagement is a given. But what is the end point for Joe, the moment we announce we won? In Ukraine, no one knows. By starting this intervention with the promise not to send NATO into actual combat, Biden sent a clear signal to Putin — if you are willing with your overwhelming military advantage over Ukraine to spend the blood and treasure, you win. Putin’s goal is the creation of some sort of buffer state between him and NATO, so Putin can win whether Kiev physically stands or tumbles. A “win” for the US side requires Putin to retreat in shame. Breaking things is always easier than getting someone to admit they were wrong.

Biden has two weapons to deploy: guns and sanctions. Can either create a win?

While Ukraine has antitank weapons and rifles, Putin has hypersonic missiles and lots of tanks. If a win for him includes a scenario where Kiev is reduced to looking like Detroit, how will any of the weapons the US sends matter? Infantry-based proxy ground warfare can delay a mechanized army but not defeat it, forestall a Ukrainian defeat but not prevent it, when its only goal is greater destruction. Notice when Zelensky showcases photos of kids with guns and old women making Molotovs and then the Russians target “civilians” an apartment complex at a time?

Those are poor odds in a war of attrition. Ukraine boasts it destroyed 509 Russian tanks, almost all using shoulder fired missiles. Maybe; one of the techniques of modern propaganda is to throw out some outrageous number, challenge people to disprove it, and then shout “you can’t disprove it so I’m right.” So no proof. But history suggests 509 man-on-tank kills is ridiculous. During Gulf War 1.0, one of the largest tank battles of modern times at 73 Easting saw Coalition forces destroy only 160 Iraqi tanks, and that was using the M-1 tank with its sophisticated aiming tech and night vision. Even at the famed Battle of the Bulge only 700 tanks from both sides were destroyed.

There are similar reasons to be skeptical of Ukrainian claims of 15,000 dead Russians in three weeks. That would be double the number killed on Iwo Jima in five weeks of fighting, or at Gettysburg on both sides in the whole battle. It is about four times the total US losses in Iraq over 17 years. Ukraine also claims to have killed five Russian generals, five more general officers that have been killed in all the wars the United States have fought since WW II. Same for the claims Russia is running out of food, gas, and tires. Same for the social media war; how many divisions does Facebook control?

The theory of sanctions is that they will place such as squeeze on Russian oligarchs Putin will be forced to withdraw from Ukraine. Putin, otherwise portrayed as a dictator who answers to no one, will supposedly listen to these men complain someone seized their yacht and cause Putin to reverse a foreign policy that he otherwise believes benefits Russia in the long run. The US has been piling sanctions on these same oligarchs for decades, with a new, tougher, round each time Putin made his moves against Georgia, Grozny, and Crimea. None of those sanctions compelled a withdrawal and none have stopped Putin from making his subsequent move against Ukraine. Effective, no, but points for creativity: there’s a plan to strip Putin’s “Eva Braun” (you can’t make this up) of her old Olympic medals in hopes she’ll withhold nooky Lysistrata-like until Putin, sorry, withdraws.

Another problem with sanctions is they are nowhere near strong enough to actually hurt. Goofy yacht warfare aside, Biden’s ban on Russian petroproducts accounts for only some one percent of Russia’s output. NATO allies are not able to participate fully without crippling their own economies. But loopholes amid half-measures are only part of the problem. Having grown used to slapping sanctions casually against lesser countries like Cuba and North Korea, Biden has limited understanding of their effects against a globally-connected economy. Such sanctions have the potential to cause grave fallout because unlike say Cuba, Russia can fight back.

Though the goal of sanctions is to punish very specific Russians, known by name, in a position to influence Putin, concern on world markets drove up prices of crude oil, natural gas, wheat, copper, nickel, aluminum, fertilizers, and gold. A grain and metals shortage now looms, even in early days of this spillover effect. While the cost to oligarchs is unknown, the affect on economies the US should be courting, not hurting, is clear. Central Asia’s economies are now caught up in the sanctions shock. These former Soviet states are strongly connected to the Russian economy through trade and outward labor migration. They will be as likely to blame the US as Russia for their problems, converting potential US allies into adversaries. We have also yet to see what counter-moves Russia will make toward the West, to include nationalization of Western capital. Russian fertilizer export restrictions are putting pressure on global food production. Russia could also restrict exports of nickel, palladium, and industrial sapphires, the building blocks for batteries, catalytic converters, and microchips. Unlike supposedly targeted sanctions, these would spank global markets broadly.

Biden is in the process of discovering sanctions are a blunt instrument. It will be a diplomatic challenge he is not likely up to to keep economic fallout from spilling over into political dissention across a Europe already not sure where it stands on “tough” sanctions.

Bad as all that sounds, some of the worst blowback from Biden’s Ukraine policy is happening with China. During the only Cold War years Biden remembers, China was mostly a sideshow and certainly not vying to be the world’s largest economy. Without seemingly understanding the world is no longer bipolar, the West versus the Soviet bloc, Joe Biden actually may do even more harm than he understands right now.

Russia is a big country that has committed only a small portion of its military to Ukraine. It absolutely does not need Chinese help to prosecute the war, as Biden claims. Biden is unnecessarily antagonizing China, who should be more or less neutral in this but instead now is being positioned by Biden as an enemy of the United States and an ally of Russia. China buys oil from Russia but that does not translate into some sort of across-the-board support for Russian foreign policy a la 1975. Biden, by threatening China with sanctions of its own, by likening Ukraine to Taiwan, and by essentially demanding of Beijing that they are with us or against us threatens to turn China just the wrong way. Economic spillover from Russia is one thing; disturbing one of the world’s largest trading relationships is another.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, China’s basic approach of not endorsing Moscow’s aggression but resisting Western efforts to punish Russia has garnered global support. The South African president blames the war on NATO. Brazil’s president refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for any China strategy, are closer to China than the US in their approach to the war. Biden seems oblivious to the opportunities this gap creates for China.

In my own years as a diplomat I heard often from smaller countries’ representatives about the “America Tax,” the idea America’s foreign policy dalliances end up costing everyone something. Whether it is a small military contribution to the Iraq War effort, or a disruption in shipping, nobody gets away free when America is on a crusade. This cost is built in to those smaller nations’ foreign policy. But when the Big Dog starts in on sanctions which will impact globally against a target like Russia, the calculus changes from a knowing sigh (“The Americans are at it again…”) to real fear. Many nations the US needs as part of its alliances don’t trust its ability to manage economic consequences to protect them, even if America is even aware of those consequences. US moves against Russia’s central bank become a weapon they fear could one day be directed against them as America seeks to weaponize the global economic system. Russia can weather a nasty storm; a smaller economy cannot. Chinese propaganda about the need for alternative economic arrangements that limit Western power are significantly more influential now than a month ago.

So in the end were left with the question of what fundamental US interest is being served by Biden‘s intervention in Ukraine at what cost. There’s always the sort of silliness that fuels Washington, things like “send a message” or “stand up for what’s right,” ambiguous goals that tend to get people killed without accomplishing anything — strategic hubris. Biden has fallen deep into the Cold War trap, and cannot accept there is little that can be done, and back away from the Ukraine to spare further bloodshed. Every world problem is not America’s to resolve and every world problem cannot be resolved by America.

wemeantwell.com

On March 10 when CIA director Bill Burns addressed the U.S. Senate and declared “Russia is losing the information war over Ukraine”, he repeated a claim that had already been amplified by Anglo-American media since the start of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Though his statement is factually true, it doesn’t tell us why and mainly reflects the West’s perspective. As usual the reality is a lot more complicated.

The U.S. information warfare capability is unparalleled: when it comes to manipulating perceptions, producing an alternate reality and weaponizing minds, the U.S. has no rivals. The U.S. coercive deployment of non-military instruments of power to bolster its hegemony, and attack any state that challenges it, is also undeniable. And that’s precisely why Russia was left with no other option than the military one to defend its interests and national security.

Hybrid warfare, and information warfare as an integral part of it, evolved into standard U.S. and NATO doctrine, but it hasn’t made military force redundant, as proxy wars demonstrate. With more limited hybrid warfare capabilities, Russia has to rely on its army to influence the outcome of a confrontation with the West that Moscow regards as an existential one. And when your existence as a nation is at risk, winning or losing the information war in the Western metaverse becomes rather irrelevant. Winning it at home and ensuring that your partners and allies understand your position and the rationale behind your actions inevitably takes precedence.

Russia’s approach to the Ukraine question is remarkably different from the West’s. As far as Russia is concerned Ukraine is not a pawn on the chessboard but rather a member of the family with whom communication has become impossible due to protracted foreign interference and influence operations. According to Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Ministry of Defence, Ukraine is the territory where the Russian world lost one of the strategic battles in the cognitive war. Having lost the battle, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war – a war to undo the damage to a country that historically has always been part of the Russian world and to prevent the same damage at home. It is rather telling that what U.S.-NATO call an “information war” is referred to as “mental’naya voina”, that is a cognitive war, by this prominent Russian strategist. Being mainly on the receiving end of information/influence operations, Russia has been studying their deleterious effects.

While it is too early to predict the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its political outcomes, one of the main takeaways is that the U.S. employment of all instruments of hybrid warfare to instigate and fuel this conflict, left Russia no alternative than the recourse to military power to solve it. You can’t win the battle for hearts and minds when your opponent controls them. You first need to restore the conditions that will make it possible to reach them and even then it will take years to heal wounds, undo the psychological conditioning.

Though disinformation and deception have always been a part of warfare, and information has long been used to support combat operations, within the framework of hybrid warfare information plays a central role, so much so that in the West combat is seen as taking place primarily through it and vast resources are assigned to influence operations both online and offline. In 2006 retired U.S. Maj. General Robert H. Scales explained a new combat philosophy that would later be enshrined in NATO’s doctrine: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.”

In the U.S.-NATO lexicon, information and influence are interchangeable words. “Information comprises and aggregates numerous social, cultural, cognitive, technical, and physical attributes that act upon and impact knowledge, understanding, beliefs, world views, and, ultimately, actions of an individual, group, system, community, or organization.”

The U.S. information war arsenal is unmatched because it controls the Internet and its main gatekeepers of content such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia… It means the U.S. can exercise control over the noosphere, that “globe-spanning realm of the mind” that RAND in 1999 was already presenting as integral to the American information strategy. For this reason no government can ignore the profound impact of the Internet on public opinion, statecraft and national sovereignty. Because neither Russia nor China can beat the U.S. in a game where it holds all the cards, the smart thing to do is to leave the gaming table, which is exactly what both powers are doing, each drawing on its specific strengths.

The “information war over Ukraine” didn’t start in response to Russia’s military operations in 2022. It was initially unleashed in Ukraine. Since 1991 the U.S. spent billions of dollars, and the EU tens of millions, to tear this country apart from Russia, not to mention the money spent by Soros’ Open Society. No price was deemed too high due to the importance of Ukraine on the geopolitical chessboard. U.S. influence operations led to two colour revolutions, the Orange Revolution (2004-05) and EuroMaidan (2013-14). After the 2014 bloody coup, with the removal of any counterweight, U.S.-NATO influence turned into full control and violent repression of dissent: those who had opposed Maidan lived in fear – the Odessa massacre being a constant reminder of the fate that would befall anyone who dared to resist the new regime.

The promotion of Neo-Nazi tendencies intensified, together with the cult of Nazi collaborationist Stepan Bandera; members of terrorist organizations such as the Azov Battalion and other ultranationalist groups joined government and the Ukranian National Guard, the past was erased and history re-written, Soviet monuments were destroyed, Russian-speakers faced daily threats and discrimination, pro-Russian parties and information outlets were banned, Russophobia was inculcated in children starting from kindergarten. In 2020 alone ultranationalist projects, such as the “Young Banderite Course”, “Banderstadt Festival of Ukrainian Spirit”, etc. received almost half of all the funds allocated by the Ukrainian government for children’s and youth organisations.

Ukrainians who lived in the separatist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and couldn’t be targeted by influence operations were targeted by rockets, bombs and bullets: the former compatriots had been recast as enemies almost overnight. While all quality of life indicators revealed a marked decline, large segments of the population lived in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance: they were told that discriminating LGBT is wrong but discriminating Russian speakers is right, remembering Soviet soldiers who had fought Nazism in WW2 and liberated Auschwitz is wrong, remembering the Holocaust is right. Because cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling, people resorted to denial and self-deception, embraced whatever opinion was dominant in their social environment to seek relief.

Since the mindset of an entire population cannot be changed overnight, even with an army of cognitive behaviour specialists, the groundwork was laid in stages. The Orange Revolution helped foster Ukrainian national identity but precisely because it leveraged on existing cultural and linguistic differences it ended up being the most regionally divided of all colour revolutions: western Ukrainians dominated the protests and eastern Ukrainians largely opposed them. The Orange Revolution had a profound effect on the way Ukrainians perceived themselves and their national identity but it didn’t succeed in severing the political, cultural, social, and economic ties between Ukraine and Russia. Most people on both sides of the border continued to regard the two countries as inextricably intertwined.

A second revolution, Euromaidan, would finish the job started in 2004. This time the narrative had a wider appeal: its proponents identified corruption and lack of economic prospects as the main grievances of the population, indicated Ukraine’s leadership and its ties to Russia as the main cause of the country’s troubles and proposed integration into the EU as a cure-all solution.

Turning Russia into a scapegoat for all societal and economic problems, fuelling an anti-Russian sentiment was exactly what a myriad of U.S. and U.S.-funded players had been doing since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, like the rest of post-Soviet countries, was teeming with media outlets, NGOs, educators, diaspora groups, political activists, business and community leaders whose status was artificially inflated by their access to foreign resources and international networks.

These “vectors of influence” introduced themselves as purveyors of “global standards and best practices”, “democratic rules”, “participatory development and accountability”, used marketing buzzwords for their work of demolition of existing practices, frames of reference and their sostitution with new ones, often of inferior quality. Under the guise of fighting corruption, offering a path to modernization and development these players became entrenched in Ukraine’s civil society, shaped its collective consciousness and demonized both Russia, local politicians and public figures who advocated closer relations with Moscow.

The work of these agents of influence was instrumental in demolishing worldviews, beliefs, values and perceptions that dated back to Soviet times, thus altering the population’s self-understanding. It ensured that younger generations would be ignorant about their country’s history and embrace a new fictional identity.

But colour revolutions require both brain and brawn to topple governments and defend the power of the new ruling class. The brute force that was necessary to intimidate and attack those who were impervious to influence operations could only be provided by fringe elements in society who had been seduced by the ultra-nationalist rhetoric.

These violent fringe groups were organized and empowered to exercise greater influence in Ukraine and thus attract more followers. A romanticized, imaginary identity was radicalized by absurd claims that Ukrainians and Russians cannot be called brotherly nations because Ukrainians are “pure-blood Slavs”, while Russians are “mixed-blood barbarians”. Nothing was beyond the pale: sleek re-enactments of Nazi propaganda tropes like torchlight parades that looked impressive on social media, speeches that echoed Hitler’s, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the cult of Bandera and those who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Army.

While foreign groups sharing the same ideological tool box were labelled extremist and terrorist organizations just across the border, in Ukraine they received advice, financial and military support by the U.S. military and the CIA. At the same time the CIA presentable spin-off, NED, was giving out funds, grants, scholarships and media awards to their globalist, politically-correct, “freedom, democracy and human rights” country fellows. The latter cohort would whitewash the crimes of the former. After all, if members of Al-Qaeda donning white helmets in Syria became the darlings of Western media and even won an Oscar, Neo-Nazis could be marketed as defenders of democracy just as easily.

Ukraine’s population was subjected to the sort of psychological operations that would make it want more of a medicine that not only didn’t cure the disease but could kill the patient. In order to turn the country into a beachhead from which to launch hostile operations aimed at weakening Russia and creating a rift between Moscow and Europe, Russophobia had to become a sort of state religion, anyone who didn’t practise it was to be marginalized and eventually excluded from public discourse. The pressure to conform was so strong that it impaired judgement.

The discursive construction of an enemy required the constant demonization of Russia (Mordor), Russians (uncivilized Eurasian barbarians) and Donbass separatists (savages, subhumans).

When neo-Nazi narratives and Russophobia are normalized and allowed to shape both policies and dominant discourse, when people are “weaned” from critical thinking, from their own history, and wage an 8-year long war against their fellow countrymen, that’s a sign people’s minds have been weaponized.

Public consciousness was actively manipulated both at the level of meaning and at the level of emotions. Selective perception and consolatory fantasies were some of the psychological mechanisms ensuring that the population would manage the stress of living in a state of cognitive dissonance where facts and fiction could no longer be separated. By offering cheap passage through a complex world, these narratives provided emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding.

The emotionally satisfying decision to believe, to have faith, inoculated individuals against counter-arguments and inconvenient facts. The election of an actor on the basis of his convincing performance as a president in a TV series titled “Servant of the People” confirmed the successful substitution of politics with its spectacular simulation: it wasn’t simply the blurring of illusion and reality, but the authentication of illusion as more real than the real itself. The majority of Ukrainians voted for a brand new party that was named after the TV fiction and was the brainchild of the same people. A party that even used billboards advertising the series for Zelensky’s election campaign.

With the global streaming of the TV series by Netflix and its broadcasting by more than a dozen TV channels in Europe we see the marketing of Zelensky to foreign audiences as an image-object whose immediate reality is its symbolic function in a semiotic system of abstract signifiers that take on a life of their own and generate a parallel, virtual reality. This virtual reality in turn generates its own discourse.

For instance, to foreign audiences the 8-year long war in Donbass that caused 14,000 deaths is less real than images extrapolated from a videogame and passed off as “the bombing of Kiev.” That’s because the war in Donbass has been largely ignored by international media.

Images of atrocities, whether taken from other contexts or fabricated, have become free-floating signifiers that can be repurposed according to the needs of propagandists, while real atrocities must be hidden from view. After all it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is true or false, as long as it is convincing.

In post-Maidan Ukraine one could see an anticipation of the fate that awaited the rest of Europe, almost as if Ukraine had been not only a laboratory for colour revolutions, but also a testing ground for the kind of cognitive warfare operations that are leading to the rapid destruction of whatever vestige of civility, logic and rationality is left in the West.

Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, education, psychological, and social engineering capabilities to achieve its ends. Social media play a central role as a force multiplier and are a powerful tool for exploiting emotions and reinforcing cognitive biases. Unprecedented information volume and velocity overwhelms individual cognitive capabilities and encourages “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Social media also induce social proofing, wherein the individual mimics and affirms others’ actions and beliefs to fit in, thus creating echo chambers of conformism and groupthink. Shaping perceptions is all that matters; critical opinions, inconvenient truths, facts that contradict the dominant narrative can be cancelled with a click, or by tweaking the algorithm. NATO uses machine learning and pattern recognition to quickly identify the locations in which social media posts, messages, and news articles originate, the topics under discussion, sentiment and linguistic identifiers, pacing of releases, links between social media accounts etc.

Such system allows real-time monitoring and provides alerts to NATO and its social media partners, who invariably comply with its requests to remove or ‘shadow ban’ content and accounts deemed problematic.

A polarized, cognitively disoriented population is a ripe target for a type of emotional manipulation known as thought-scripting and mind-boxing. A person’s thinking comes to congeal around increasingly set scripts. And if the script is arguable, it is unlikely to be changed through argument. The well-boxed brain is impervious to information that doesn’t conform to the script and defenceless against powerful falsehoods or simplifications that it has been primed to believe. The more boxed a mind, the more polarized the political environment and public dialogue. This cognitive damage makes all efforts to promote balance and compromise unattractive, in the worst cases even impossible. The totalitarian turn of Western liberal regimes and the insular mentality of Western political elites seem to confirm this sad state of affairs.

With the ban on Russian information outlets, the exclusion and bullying of anyone who seeks to explain Russia’s position, the equivalent of ethnic cleansing of public discourse has been achieved and its cheerleaders have a mad grin on their face that doesn’t bode well.

Examples of irrational mob frenzy are too many to list, those who have fallen victims to this pseudo-religious fervour demand that Russia and Russians be cancelled. For that matter you don’t even need to be human or alive to become a target of mass hysteria: Russian cats and dogs have been banned from competitions, Russian classics banned from universities, Russian products taken off the shelves.

The relentless manipulation of people’s emotions has unleashed a dangerous whirlwind of mass insanity. As in Ukraine, so in Europe citizens are supporting decisions and calling for measures against their own interests, prosperity and future. “I’ll freeze for Ukraine!” is the new epitome of virtue-signalling among those who access only U.S.- approved information, the kind of script compatible with a frame of reference that excludes complexity. In this fictional, parallel universe, a sort of safe, reassuring, compensatory metaverse that has broken free from the messiness of reality, the West always occupies the moral high-ground.

By and large international media coverage of the war in Ukraine has been not only fictional but also completely aligned with narratives provided by Ukrainian propaganda units that were set up and funded by USAID, NED, Open Society, Pierre Omidyar Network, the European Endowment for Democracy et al.

Dan Cohen in an article published by Mint Press News described in detail how the system of Ukrainian strategic information works. Ukraine, with the help of foreign consultants and key media partners, built an effective network of PR-media agencies that actively churn out and promote fake news. In NATO countries whoever dares to question the correctness of this information is accused of being a “Putin’s agent”, attacked and excluded from public debate. The information space is so heavily guarded that it resembles an echo-chamber.

Ukrainian disinformation campaigns affect the judgment of both Western audiences and lawmakers. On March 8 when Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed the British House of Commons remotely, many members of parliament had no earphones to listen to the simultaneous translation of his speech. It didn’t matter. They liked the show and applauded enthusiastically. In their boxed-minds Zelensky had already been framed as “our good guy in Kiev”, and any script, even an incomprehensible one, would do. On March 1 diplomats from Western countries and their allies walked out during a video link address by Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Boxed-brains are cognitively incapable to engage in discussions with those who hold different views, making diplomacy impossible. That’s why in lieu of diplomatic skills we see theatrics and media stunts, empty suits who deliver script lines and project moral superiority.

The West has found refuge in this media-generated make-believe world because it can no longer solve its systemic problems: instead of development and progress we see economic, social, intellectual and political regression, anxiety, frustration, delusions of grandeur and irrationality. The West has become completely self-referential.

Dystopian ideological and social-engineering projects such as Trans-humanism and the Great Reset are the only solutions Western elites can offer to address the inevitable implosion of a system they contributed to wreck.

These “solutions” require the suppression of pluralism, the curtailing of freedom of information and expression, the widespread use of violence to intimidate critical thinkers, disinformation and emotional manipulation, in short, the destruction of the very foundations of modern democracy, public discourse, rational debate and informed participation in decision-making processes. The cherry on top is that it is cynically packaged and marketed as a “victory of democracy against authoritarianism.” To project democracy first they had to kill it and then replace it with its simulation.

But a global communication and information space that doesn’t respect the principle of pluralism and mutual respect inevitably produces its own gravediggers. We already see how this global space is fragmenting into heavily defended information spaces along the lines of geopolitical spheres of influence. The U.S.-led globalization project is unravelling and that’s mainly due to its overambition.

The U.S. might be winning the information war in the West but any victory in the parallel universe created by the media could easily turn into a Pyrrhic one when reality reasserts itself.

Recent history tells us that carefully crafted narratives, disinformation and demonization of the opponent radicalize and polarize public opinion, but victory in the information battlefield doesn’t necessarily translate into military or political victory, as we have seen in Syria and Afghanistan.

While the collective West revels in its success after the nuclear option of banning all Russian media from the global infosphere it controls, it’s too blinded by hubris to even notice the inevitable fallout. Total control over the narrative is achieved through authoritarian measures and the repression of dissenting voices, that is a reversal of those inclusive democracy and universalist values that the West hypocritically claims to defend and is actively projecting in the Global South. In the ideological confrontation with countries it defines “authoritarian” the West is losing the edge it claimed to possess.

The unipolar, U.S.-led world order is coming to an end and the West is fast losing its influence. Russia is paying attention and in the future it might invest more energy in reaching non-Western audiences instead, that is people who aren’t as indoctrinated and impervious to truth, facts and reason as their Western counterparts.

While at the beginning of the information revolution China took measures to protect its digital sovereignty, for many reasons it took Russia longer to recognize the danger posed by a communication and information system that despite initial claims of being an open, level playing field, was actually rigged in favour of those who controlled it.

Russia’s initiative in Ukraine is not only a response to attacks on the population of Donbass and a way to forestall Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Its avowed goal to denazify Ukraine is a defensive response to the intense cognitive war operations that the U.S. has been conducting both inside Russia and in neighbouring countries. NATO’s eastward expansion wasn’t simply a military expansion, it led to the occupation of the psycho-cultural, information and political space as well.

After losing a strategic battle in the cognitive war, watching the normalization of Neo-Nazi Russophobia and realizing that hostile forces, both domestic and foreign, have become entrenched in Ukraine, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war, as Andrei Ilnitsky explained in an interview to Zvezda. Ilnitsky recognized that “The main danger of cognitive warfare is that its consequences are irreversible and can manifest themselves through generations. People who speak the same language as us, suddenly became our enemies.” The erection of monuments to Stepan Bandera while those of Soviet soldiers were being destroyed, was not only an intolerable provocation for Russia – a country that lost 26.6 million people fighting Nazism in WW2 – it was also a tangible expression of the kind of erasure and rewriting of history that is not limited to Ukraine.

The current conflict in Ukraine shows that restoring a sense of reality exacts a heavy and bloody toll. Unfortunately in matters of national security painful decisions cannot be postponed indefinitely.

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine”, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

For years, neocons and arms industry darlings like @RepAdamSchiff have sought to re-arm Ukraine and escalate the conflict in Donbas. By stirring up Russiagate, they finally got their deadly deal. My latest: https://t.co/pyJB4btOSk

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 8, 2018

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia

My response to @CNN‘s ridiculous and profoundly dishonest article “25 times Trump was soft on Russia”.https://t.co/nxX7gHC14m

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 18, 2019

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War https://t.co/k8YWZ9ylQH

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 27, 2022

Lauria writes:

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The Ukraine war is setting new geopolitical precedents around the world, which is making it hard for analysts to draw up the usual ‘winners and losers’ listicle usually offered. China, without question is looking more like a winner when we consider not only the new deals it has struck both in Russia, buying up oil firms’ assets at bargain prices, but also setting a new paradigm for its relations with Washington which recently sent one of its top mandarins to threaten it, if it continued to assist Russia in its war in the Ukraine. It ignored Washington and has come out of the closet and backed Russia on many levels, firming up the triplet of eastern powers – Russia, China and India – and their positioning in the world’s economy even more.

And then there is Saudi Arabia, whose mercurial leader, the young crown prince called “MBS” has never really got over how Donald Trump abandoned him during a rather awkward baptism of opprobrium from the world’s press over the ghastly murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Fast forward to Joe Biden taking office and the Saudis didn’t lose anytime in opening up channels of diplomacy and cooperation brainstorming with Moscow, confident that when their own people’s uprising kicks off – and it will one day – that Russia might be there for them, as it was in Syria for Assad.

The Saudis are actually doing alright now with much higher oil prices and their relations with China improving every day. As a smack in the face from MBS to Biden, the former recently just ignored his calls to produce more oil as the midterms loom, which will be felt by the Democrats at the polls when votes are lost due to high energy prices blamed on Biden. It’s a similar story with Boris Johnson and MBS who recently sent the British leader away with a flea in his ear when he asked the Crown Prince for a better oil deal. So much for the special relationship with the very country that created the very family – Saud – which now owns what is now called Saudi Arabia. No prisoners, Boris.

With China, it’s a win-win. MBS gets revenge against the U.S. which still wants it to be a lap dog and accept the tenets of U.S. hegemony, while selling more oil to China, in Yuan which hits the U.S. even harder. China also gets to show the Americans that they really aren’t the superpower they think they are by dumping the dollar for oil sales and looking at the new ‘Eastern bloc’ model which is where really the whole Ukraine war is taking us.

A brutal and simple binary world, where everything is neatly divided into two groups, whose people and businesses are discouraged from crossing the line into one and other’s camp. Think new Cold War with Russia, China, India and most of Asia on one side with its own banking system which replaces Swift, its own internet and internet rules, own eBay, own Facebook, own currencies (including crypto) and a new world order which probably dumps U.S. weapons and banking altogether, as well as western energy markets.

But there will be casualties when the body bags are counted and an analysis done. Relations between Russia and Turkey are probably going to be very bad, certainly as long as Recep Erdogan remains in office as Putin is not going to forgive him for supplying deadly Turkish drones to the Ukrainian forces and closing the Bosporus – despite the charade of both countries foreign ministers’ meetings in Moscow. Other divisions will be notable within NATO and EU countries as it becomes clear that both these organisations have deeply rooted cultural and political problems both internally and across the board which simply don’t allow them to take on bold tasks when the moment is presented. The three eastern European countries presently visiting Ukraine will feel very let down by most other EU member states and NATO partners, when their fears are not adhered to. They will inevitably develop stronger ties with the Zelensky administration while becoming more acerbic towards Brussels and its authoritarian manner.

And the EU hardly come out well either. Some may ask, when peace finally comes and it will be the EU expected to bankroll at least 100 billion euros in reconstruction aid, could the EU have done something earlier to have prevented the escalation, given that it was Brussels as far back as 2004 which has been signalling to Ukraine to consider itself a candidate for membership. Let’s not forget also that part of the price of playing tough, the EU will have to accept that its own actions also have led to Moscow dumping euros as part of its cash reserves and using the Chinese clearing system for its banks more and more. We can certainly expect more division and in-fighting, as we saw earlier when EU member states couldn’t agree on the terms of Covid restructuring aid, when it is discussed how much money should go to Ukraine and Zelensky’s deeply corrupt business elite. Putin, in the meantime, has already won the war in Ukraine by Zelensky already conceding that he’s dumped the idea of NATO membership, which is a considerable blow to its credibility as an amalgamation of new countries join the Russia-China-India business/geopolitical bloc. Those who point to Putin and lamely accuse him of being a Soviet anachronism fail to see the irony of the West playing a big role in provoking him since the early nineties when the broken promises of NATOs expansion east begun. Or, for that matter, the Stalinist mentality behind the EU’s decision to cut off Russia’s media from the rest of the world which reminds me of Nazis burning books in the late 30s.

The panicked language of appeasement rarely adds anything of value to debates over foreign policy.

By Christopher MOTT

“Appeasement,” “Munich,” and the years of 1938-9 retain immense rhetorical power when invoked by political and media actors in the English-speaking world. In the media landscape, foreign policy pundits often insinuate that to negotiate with rivals is to risk repeating the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain, the pre-World War II British Prime Minister who is said to have “given away” a part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for “peace in our time.” Subsequent events cast the phrase into infamy.

Putting aside the fact that Chamberlain’s diplomacy had a fair amount of contemporaneous public support and served the sound strategic purpose of buying time for British rearmament to achieve a stronger position against Germany, the characterization of the British prime minister as a hapless dupe playing into Hitler’s hands in the naïve hope of avoiding inevitable conflict has lived on in the popular imagination ever since.

The specter of “appeasement” has most recently been invoked by those critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently confrontational in response to Russian actions in Ukraine. Senators Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst have led the charge in weaponizing the phrase, a continuation of a long bipartisan tradition. Influenced by the (now largely debunked) “Russiagate” scandal, Democratic politicians and affiliated journalists once hurled the same accusation at the Trump administration for its alleged failure to be sufficiently hawkish in Syria or Ukraine. A CNN contributor even referred to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki as a “surrender summit.”

Such commentary is baked into the foreign policy consensus in Washington and goes beyond the establishment’s hatred of Trump. In 2012, President Obama had to deflect criticism from electoral challenger Mitt Romney for allegedly having failed to take the Russian threat seriously enough. Obama also faced one of the most bizarre rounds of criticism for his willingness to negotiate with Iran, and was called “an appeaser like Neville Chamberlain” by a conservative commentator who then could not explain who Chamberlain even was or why the example was historically pertinent to Obama’s convening nuclear talks with Tehran.

Together, these bellicose accusations point to a greater culture of using and abusing Second World War analogies for every contemporary geopolitical problem. Be it comparing new rivals to the Axis Powers, invoking the threat of global total war, or casting all rivalries as existential and ideological zero-sum contests, the Second World War looms large in the imagination of the foreign policy commentariat in the North Atlantic. In a sense, this should not surprise. A majority of the world’s population lives in countries that benefited from Allied victory. The rapid expansion and subsequent brutality enacted by Germany, Japan, and Italy on much of the world was that of militant revisionist powers—countries seeking to upset the post-WWI order established by the Treaty of Versailles, the Washington Naval Treaty, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Perhaps more pertinently, most adults alive today grew up with elders who directly experienced and suffered during the war era and who, if willing to speak about it at all, had harrowing accounts of what those times were like. The fear that such a time of global strife could return is ever-present, as is the pride of personally knowing people who survived the crisis. I sympathize with this perspective, as someone partially descended from Japanese immigrants whose relatives fought on both sides of the Pacific Theater. My grandmother, then still a child, survived “Operation Meetinghouse,” the concentrated firebombing of Tokyo.

Largely regarded as the deadliest air raid in history, Operation Meetinghouse was estimated to have caused 100,000 deaths and rendered over a million people homeless. Its effectiveness can be attributed to the bombers’ low-level altitude, which increased accuracy, as well as the use of incendiary munitions to wreak maximum damage on the then-largely wooden city. Only in the later years of her life would my grandmother open up about the specific details of the night she lost half of her immediate relatives in a matter of hours; how she and some of her siblings, hating the smell of the densely packed crowds that filled air-raid shelters, had decided to go above ground rather than stay underground during the raid; how this impulsive decision had spared their lives when the civilian shelter was directly hit in the bombardment, killing everyone inside.

But her tragic odyssey had only just begun. She then had to navigate a post-apocalyptic Tokyo with her siblings—one of whom was sickly—in tow. People ran towards the river for relief from the ever-present flames, only to find the water filled with charred-black and withered bodies; napalm-based accelerants could not be doused with water alone, causing many who threw themselves into the water to nevertheless perish in flames. In the midst of this chaos, famine and disease soon descended upon the city, taking a further toll on the survivors. The post-raid casualties included additional relatives. The nightmare would last until the American occupation of Japan brought an end not just to the war and the militarist government that had caused it, but the supply shortages that reverberated as aftershocks in its wake.

This is just one particularly tragic example of many that illustrate the trans-generational impact of the Second World War, and it helps to explain the evocative power of the time period. But it also explains how distorting and misleading this invocation can be: The Second World War was not the only devastating conflict to occur in modern history, nor is it necessarily the one most germane to the present moment. As Westerners, we may feel connected to it more than most, but the world we inhabit today is not that of the late 1930s and early 1940s. By elevating the Second World War to a privileged place in the hierarchies of our historical analogies, we also ignore—in our indignant, sanctimonious moralism as victors—much of the conflict’s original complexity and moral ambiguity.

We brush aside the inconvenient context of colonialism, imperialism, and national humiliation and we ignore the prevailing geopolitical considerations of the period. Finland and Thailand, for instance, had legitimate reasons to become co-belligerents with the Axis due to preexisting territorial disputes with the Soviet Union and the British Empire, respectively. And Iran, a country effectively torn at the seams by both Moscow and London, suffered invasion and occupation despite its ostensible neutrality in the war. These countries and others could make a case complicating claims of the universal moral righteousness of the war. Many in India make the argument that Churchill was India’s Hitler given that the Bengal Famine was largely the result of British imperial policy, which killed millions. This was just one of many such events in almost two centuries of British misrule in South Asia, a context that makes the Hitler-admiring Japanese collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose look far more morally complicated than can first be assumed. Similar reasons explain the fact that popular opinion in America was against direct U.S. involvement in the war before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Historical analogies are always imperfect, of course. But the all-or-nothing approach of seeing everything through the lens of a single simplified and totalizing conflict is unhelpful. While it may explain certain aspects of the world since 1945, like the existence of the United Nations, its Security Council, and the decolonization of old European empires, it fails to shed light on our present moment. In fact, its routine usage by hawks suggests it is intended to sabotage nuanced discussion about complex geopolitical crises and foment more conflict.

Focusing on World War II has the effect of obscuring the fact that the formation of a “postwar era” order is not unique to our time. The Thirty Years’ War of the mid-17th Century would be the most proportionally devastating conflict Central Europe had faced to that time and led to the rise of the Westphalian state system, which, for a time, reduced the number of conflicts in Europe and sidelined sectarianism. The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars involved mass mobilization, the scouring of entire countries, and a global dimension. It would culminate in a “Concert of Europe,” which also served to temporarily reduce tensions between the previously warring great powers (even while exporting conflict abroad to European colonies). History is replete with cycles of geopolitical instability giving way to new orders, which then decay over time, leading to instability and an imperfect repeat of the process. Scholars from Sima Qian in ancient China to Ibn Khaldun in North Africa of the late Middle Ages have noticed similar cyclical patterns. These observations call into question the validity of an obsessive focus on a single specific era at the expense of all others.

With the fading of the “American Moment,” we are witnessing a rise in multi-polarity with more and more states able to wield power independently on the world stage. Perhaps, then, a sounder historical analogy and a better model to make sense of the dangers we face would be the First World War, not the Second. In the run-up to the Great War, it was Britain that was losing its previously unchallenged hegemonic position. As the balance of power changed, states seeking realignment created hair-trigger alliance systems—where a single peripheral conflict, like the “July Crisis” between Serbia and Austria-Hungary—could drag the entire planet into a world war.

As we see in the case of Ukraine—with much of the mainstream media joining the blob to falsely declare Kiev a “U.S. ally”—the temptation for major powers to make foolhardy proclamations in disputes peripheral to their core interests is everlasting. The reason foreign policy elites and North Atlantic societies in general fixate on the Second World War and its associated narratives of courage and resistance is that such arguments, made with a dose of moralism, serves the compulsion to war felt by many English-speaking elites.

If it is the goal of Western policymakers to avoid a catastrophic conflict with revisionist powers (in an era of nuclear weapons, to boot) and protect what remains of the post-1945 order, they would be wise to avoid over-expanding alliance networks that lock more countries into stark binaries in foreign policy. This is especially true when those countries, like Ukraine, are distant from the core interests of the United States (the key actor in NATO) and tangential to a stable balance of power among great powers.

It is not “appeasement” to recognize the facts on the ground and recalibrate to focus on dialogue during such disagreements. Rather, it is a simple acknowledgement that when multiple countries have competing interests, the issue is best resolved with each nation making a sober calculation of its respective national-security priorities. Diplomacy must come first. By allowing an obsession with the shadows of 1938-9 to blind us to our present reality, we risk the far-more-likely scenario of stumbling into something reminiscent of another July Crisis.

theamericanconservative.com

By Jack F. MATLOCK, Jr.

We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine.

His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members. President Joe Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy—an agreement with Russia, France and Germany which the United States endorsed.

Maybe I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections.

Since clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing up to Vladimir Putin”? Actually, it seems most likely that President Putin’s goals are what he says they are—and as he has been saying since his speech in Munich in 2007. To simplify and paraphrase, I would sum them up as: “Treat us with at least a modicum of respect. We do not threaten you or your allies, why do you refuse us the security you insist for yourself?”

The End of the Cold War

Bush -Gorbachev press conference, Helsinki Summit, Finland. Sept. 9, 1990. (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers, ignoring the rapidly unfolding events that marked the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, considered that the end of the Cold War. They were wrong. The Cold War had ended at least two years earlier. It ended by negotiation and was in the interest of all the parties. President George H.W. Bush hoped that Mikhail Gorbachev would manage to keep most of the twelve non-Baltic republics in a voluntary federation.

On August 1, 1991, Bush made a speech to the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) in which he endorsed Gorbachev’s plans for a voluntary federation and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” The latter phrase was inspired by Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakurdia’s attacks on minorities in Soviet Georgia. For reasons I will explain elsewhere, they apply to Ukraine today.

Bottom line: Despite the prevalent belief, both among the “blob” in the United States, and most of the Russian public, the United States did not support, much less cause the break-up of the Soviet Union. We supported throughout the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to legalize their claim to independence. And—by the way—despite frequently voiced fears—Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle that the European Union is pledged to enforce.

But, let’s move on to the first of the assertions in the subtitle:

Was the Crisis Avoidable?

Well, since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.

Maybe we should look at this question more broadly. How do other countries respond to alien military alliances near their borders? Since we are talking about American policy, maybe we should pay some attention to the way the United States has reacted to attempts of outsiders to establish alliances with countries nearby. Anybody remember the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration of a sphere of influence that comprised an entire hemisphere? And we meant it! When we learned that Kaiser’s Germany was attempting to enlist Mexico as an ally during the first world war, that was a powerful incentive for the subsequent declaration of war against Germany.

Then, of course, in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis—something I remember vividly since I was at the American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to Kennedy.

Should we look at events like the Cuban Missile Crisis from the standpoint of some of the principles of international law, or from the standpoint of the likely behavior of a country’s leaders if they feel threatened? What did international law at that time say about the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba?

Cuba was a sovereign state and had the right to seek support for its independence from anywhere it chose. It had been threatened by the United States, even an attempt to invade, using anti-Castro Cubans. It asked the Soviet Union for support. Knowing that the United States had deployed nuclear weapons in Turkey, a U.S. ally actually bordering on the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, decided to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. How could the U.S. legitimately object if the Soviet Union was deploying weapons similar to those deployed against it?

Obviously, it was a mistake. A big mistake! (One is reminded of Talleyrand’s remark … “Worse than a crime …”) International relations, like it or not, are not determined by debating, interpreting and applying the finer points of “international law”—which in any case is not the same as municipal law, the law within countries. Kennedy had to react to remove the threat. The Joint Chiefs recommended taking out the missiles by bombing. Fortunately, Kennedy stopped short of that, declared a blockade and demanded the removal of the missiles.

At the end of the week of messages back and forth—I translated Khrushchev’s longest—it was agreed that Khrushchev would remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba. What was not announced was that Kennedy also agreed that he would remove the U.S. missiles from Turkey but that this commitment must not be made public.

We American diplomats in Embassy Moscow were delighted at the outcome, of course. We were not even informed of the agreement regarding missiles in Turkey. We had no idea that we had come close to a nuclear exchange. We knew the U.S. had military superiority in the Caribbean and we would have cheered if the U.S. Air Force had bombed the sites. We were wrong.

Executive Committee meeting of the National Security Council- Cuba Crisis. President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. White House, Cabinet Room, Oct. 29, 1962.  (Kennedy Library)

In later meetings with Soviet diplomats and military officers, we learned that, if the sites had been bombed, the officers on the spot could have launched the missiles without orders from Moscow. We could have lost Miami, and then what? We also did not know that a Soviet submarine came close to launching a nuclear-armed torpedo against the destroyer that was preventing its coming up for air.

It was a close call. It is quite dangerous to get involved in military confrontations with countries with nuclear weapons. You don’t need an advanced degree in international law to understand that. You need only common sense.

OK—It was predictable. Was it predicted?

“The most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War”

My words, and my voice was not the only one. In 1997, when the question of adding more members to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement:

“I consider the Administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.”

The reason I cited was the presence in the Russian Federation of a nuclear arsenal that, in overall effectiveness, matched if not exceeded that of the United States. Either of our arsenals, if actually used in a hot war, was capable of ending the possibility of civilization on earth, possibly even causing the extinction of the human race and much other life on the planet. Though the United States and the Soviet Union had, as a result of arms control agreements concluded by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, negotiations for further reductions stalled during the Clinton Administration. There was not even an effort to negotiate the removal of short-range nuclear weapons from Europe.

That was not the only reason I cited for including, rather than excluding Russia from European security. I explained as follows:

“The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the Administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.”

Then I added, “All of the purported goals of NATO enlargement are laudable. Of course the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are culturally part of Europe and should be guaranteed a place in European institutions. Of course we have a stake in the development of democracy and stable economies there. But membership in NATO is not the only way to achieve these ends. It is not even the best way in the absence of a clear and identifiable security threat.”

In fact, the decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies that produced the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe. President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a “Europe whole and free.” Soviet President Gorbachev had spoken of “our common European home,” had welcomed representatives of East European governments who threw off their Communist rulers and had ordered radical reductions in Soviet military forces by explaining that for one country to be secure, there must be security for all.

The first President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting on Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage.”) The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch.”

These comments were made to President Gorbachev before the Soviet Union broke up. Once it did, the Russian Federation had less than half the population of the Soviet Union and a military establishment demoralized and in total disarray. While there was no reason to enlarge NATO after the Soviet Union recognized and respected the independence of the East European countries, there was even less reason to fear the Russian Federation as a threat.

Willfully Precipitated?

Putin and Bush sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in Moscow, May 24, 2002. (White House)

Adding countries in Eastern Europe to NATO continued during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) but that was not the only thing that stimulated Russian objection. At the same time, the United States began withdrawing from the arms control treaties that had tempered, for a time, an irrational and dangerous arms race and were the foundation agreements for ending the Cold War.

The most significant was the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) which had been the cornerstone treaty for the series of agreements that halted for a time the nuclear arms race. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia, President Putin was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harbored Osama ben Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had inspired the attacks.

It was clear at that time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States. The jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting Russia. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued its course of ignoring Russian–and also allied–interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression which was opposed not only by Russia, but also by France and Germany.

As President Putin pulled Russia out of the bankruptcy that took place in the late 1990s, stabilized the economy, paid off Russia’s foreign debts, reduced the activity of organized crime, and even began building a financial nest egg to weather future financial storms, he was subjected to what he perceived as one insult after another to his perception of Russia’s dignity and security.

He enumerated them in a speech in Munich in 2007. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates responded that we didn’t need a new Cold War. Quite true, of course, but neither he, nor his superiors, nor his successors seemed to take Putin’s warning seriously. Then Senator Joseph Biden, during his candidacy for the presidential election in 2008, pledged to “stand up to Vladimir Putin!” Huh? What in the world had Putin done to him or to the United States?¹

^(Senator Biden, as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997, had approved NATO expansion. Throughout his tenure in the Senate he opposed lifting the trade restrictions imposed by the Jackson-Vanik amendment even though they never should have applied to the Russian Federation.)

Although President Barack Obama initially promised policy changes, in fact his government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian influence and, indeed, to encourage “regime change” in Russia itself. American actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most Russians, as indirect attacks on them.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was a brutal dictator but the only effective bulwark against the Islamic state, a movement that had blossomed in Iraq following the U.S. invasion and was spreading into Syria. Military aid to a supposed “democratic opposition” quickly fell into the hands of jihadists allied with the very Al Qaeda that had organized the 9/11 attacks on the United States!

But the threat to nearby Russia was much greater since many of the jihadists hailed from areas of the former Soviet Union including Russia itself. Syria is also Russia’s close neighbor; the U.S. was seen strengthening enemies of both the United States and Russia with its misguided attempt to decapitate the Syrian government.

So far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic governance. The violence that still simmers in Ukraine started in the “pro-Western” west, not in the Donbass where it was a reaction to what was viewed as the threat of violence against Ukrainians who are ethnic Russian.

During President Obama’s second term, his rhetoric became more personal, joining a rising chorus in the American and British media vilifying the Russian president. Obama spoke of economic sanctions against Russians as “costing” Putin for his “misbehavior” in Ukraine, conveniently forgetting that Putin’s action had been popular in Russia and that Obama’s own predecessor could be credibly accused of being a war criminal.

Obama then began to hurl insults at the Russian nation as a whole, with allegations like “Russia makes nothing anybody wants,” conveniently ignoring the fact that the only way we could get American astronauts to the international space station at that time was with Russian rockets and that his government was trying its best to prevent Iran and Turkey from buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

I am sure some will say, “What’s the big deal? Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, but then negotiated an end of the Cold War.” Right! Reagan condemned the Soviet empire of old—and subsequently gave Gorbachev credit for changing it—but he never publicly castigated the Soviet leaders personally. He treated them with personal respect, and as equals, even treating Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to formal dinners usually reserved for chiefs of state or government. His first words in private meetings was usually something like, “We hold the peace of the world in our hands. We must act responsibly so the world can live in peace.”

Things got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused, without evidence, of being a Russian dupe, Trump made sure he embraced every anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattered Putin as a great leader.

Reciprocal expulsions of diplomats, started by the United States in the final days of Obama’s tenure continued in a grim vicious circle that has resulted in a diplomatic presence so emaciated that for months the United States did not have enough staff in Moscow to issue visas for Russians to visit the United States.

As so many of the other recent developments, the mutual strangulation of diplomatic missions reverses one of the proudest achievements of American diplomacy in latter Cold War years when we worked diligently and successfully to open up the closed society of the Soviet Union, to bring down the iron curtain that separated “East” and “West.” We succeeded, with the cooperation of a Soviet leader who understood that his country desperately needed to join the world.

All right, I rest my case that today’s crisis was “willfully precipitated.” But if that is so, how can I say that it can be easily resolved by the application of common sense?

The short answer is because it can be. What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none.

By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russophobic stance (a story requiring a separate study) that it will take great political skill to navigate the treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome.

President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? For what? Nobody is threatening Poland or Bulgaria except waves of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and the desiccated areas of the African savannah. So what is the 82^nd Airborne supposed to do?

Well, as I have suggested earlier, maybe this is just an expensive charade. Maybe the subsequent negotiations between the Biden and Putin governments will find a way to meet the Russian concerns. If so, maybe the charade will have served its purpose. And maybe then members of congress will start dealing with the growing problems Americans have at home instead of making them worse.

One can dream, can’t one?

consortiumnews.com

Georgy Arbatov, the witty Soviet diplomat, remarked for an American audience at the end of the Cold War: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” His observation at the time seemed to be an oxymoron.

Arbatov died in 2010 at the age of 87. But how true his words have proven nearly 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was presumed to be the end of the Cold War and America’s historic victory. As it turns out, there were no winners.

The seasoned diplomat served as an advisor on U.S. relations to five Soviet leaders. He traveled to the United States frequently and was the U.S. media’s go-to Soviet spokesman. Arbatov knew intimately how the Cold War worked as an organizing principle for the edifice of U.S. society, politics, economics and military.

He knew how and why the Soviet Union was cast as the “evil empire” by the U.S. The portrayal had little to do with the Soviet Union objectively presenting a mortal threat. But the waging of a Cold War and forging a supposed Soviet nemesis to “the American way of life” was a vital necessity for the operation of U.S. global power.

The militarism was essential for the functioning of American capitalism and its vast taxpayer-funded Pentagon budgets every year.

Having a Soviet enemy also provided the United States with an apparent purpose of “defending the free world” and acting as a patron over European and NATO allies. In less benign terms, the relationship is seen more as one of hegemony and Washington’s dominance.

A third vital reason for Cold War against the Soviet Union was the cover it gave to U.S. military adventures around the world. Under the guise of protecting the world from “Godless Communism”, the Americans prosecuted imperialist wars and subterfuges that can otherwise be seen as criminal aggression and genocides.

A fourth crucial benefit from having a supposed dastardly foreign enemy was the national unity it provided for American rulers. Citizens would rally around the flag and the mythology of “American exceptionalism”.

When the Soviet Union disappeared from the global map in 1991, incisive analysts like Georgy Arbatov discerned that it would also herald the demise of the United States.

For a brief moment, there was euphoria from “winning the Cold War”. President HW Bush declared a “new world order” under American leadership. State Department scholars hailed the “end of history” had arrived in the form of “liberal democracy” and market capitalism. How fleeting do these celebrations seem now.

The loss of a Soviet enemy also in a very real way spelled the end of the United States. So much of the modern U.S. state since World War II has been shaped by Cold War militarism. Without the cover of a Soviet bogeyman, the United States became visible for the imperialist monster that it is. The emperor was naked.

No sooner had the Soviet Union dissolved than the United States embarked on a seeming non-stop rampage of wars across the globe. The relentless warmongering has been largely about finding a purpose for wielding U.S. power under a myriad of pretexts from “defending human rights” to “war on drugs”, from “preventing weapons of mass destruction” to “war on terrorism”, and so on.

One baleful outcome of this degenerate conduct has been the corrosive effect on international law, the United Nations Charter and, ironically, the presumed moral authority of the U.S. The international standing of the U.S. has plummeted as the world comes to abhor its unilateral arrogance and tyrannical, pathological caprice. The avowed pretexts for military interventions were never sufficiently plausible despite having a global media machine (conceitedly called the “free press”) to sell those pretexts to the public.

Without a seemingly credible international mission – fighting the evil Soviet empire – the United States has lost the ability to cohere its own nation. The Wizard of Oz is an impotent charlatan. It is no coincidence that a mere 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the U.S. is a cauldron of internal political chaos and seething enmity. Republicans and Democrats are riven by mutual contempt as one party accuses the other of treason and treachery.

The U.S. military spending of over $700 billion a year appears as a grotesque and shameful obscenity. All the more so in the face of a plethora of neglected American social needs and infrastructure collapse.

That is why the U.S. political class has needed to revive the Cold War as an absolute necessity. Without the Cold War, the United States is in mortal danger of collapsing from its own internal failures as a hyper-militarized national security state.

This explains the madcap media propaganda campaign over recent weeks to stoke dangerous tensions in Europe with Russia. It explains, too, why the U.S. has continually slated China as a global adversary. And why the Pentagon has sought to portray a growing natural partnership between Moscow and Beijing as an alarming pernicious development that “threatens Western democracy”.

However, reviving the Cold War is a futile endeavor. The United States and its allies are not threatened by Russia or China in any objective way. Thus, the demonization of Russia and China – while acting as a short-term cover for the United States and causing wanton geopolitical tensions even to the point of risking confrontation – will in the end not suffice as a pretext. The U.S. has a date with destiny as it faces up to its own inherent failings and its very real enemy within – the national security state.

Benjamin Norton reports on the meeting in Beijing between China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin designed to deepen the integration of the two Eurasian superpowers.

By Ben NORTON

Feb. 4, 2022 may very well be remembered in history textbooks as an important date in the shift of global politics.

That day was not only the inauguration of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing; it also saw a historic meeting between the presidents of China and Russia.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signed a series of important economic and political agreements, deepening the integration of the two Eurasian superpowers.

Among these was a major 30-year deal in which Russia will supply gas to China via a new pipeline, with both sides of the energy transfers managed by state-owned companies. And in a sign of their mutual efforts to challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar, they decided to settle the sales in euros.

Following the Xi-Putin reunion, the Chinese and Russian governments released a lengthy joint statement declaring a “new era” of multipolarity, proposing a new international political model that will leave behind the unipolar hegemonic order dominated by Washington.

At more than 5,000 words in length, the joint declaration was in some ways a kind of manifesto. It was obviously carefully drafted before the meeting, and it clearly defined the contrasting ideological lines of the new cold war: On one side is the United States and its NATO allies, which are defending a status quo based on unilateralism and interventionism (that is to say, imperialism); on the other side are China, Russia, and their allies, which are building a new system rooted in multilateralism and sovereignty.

“The world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation,” the joint statement declared.

In this “new era,” a “trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world,” the Eurasian powers wrote. That center of power is no longer concentrated in the capitals of trans-Atlantic Western colonialist powers; the East and the South have risen.

Beijing and Moscow could hardly have been any more straightforward in what they were proposing as an alternative: they “condemn[ed] the practice of interference in the internal affairs of other states for geopolitical purposes,” and instead called “to establish a just multipolar system of international relations,” using the word “multipolar” four times, and “multilateral” 11 more.

Message to NATO 

NATO leaders watch a multimedia tower display visualizations of the military alliance’s adaptation through the NATO 2030 agenda, June 14, 2021. (NATO, Flickr)

The historic Chinese-Russian statement was marked by its appeal for de-escalation, and its insistence that NATO must stop expanding and “abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries.”

The fact that the joint statement employed such language (it warned three times of the U.S.-led bloc’s “cold war” mentality) is an obvious acknowledgement by the Eurasian powers that Washington is waging a second cold war, and that it seeks nothing less than the overthrow of the governments in Beijing and Moscow.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made this goal clear as day in a bellicose 2020 speech at the Richard Nixon library, in which he declared, “We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change.” The former CIA director insisted, “Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time.”

Then in 2021, NATO’s de facto think tank the Atlantic Council published “The Longer Telegram,” modeled after the “long telegram” of cold warrior George Kennan, who crafted U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union. The Longer Telegram stated that Chinese President Xi must be replaced and Beijing should be forced “to conclude that it is in China’s best interests to continue operating within the U.S.-led liberal international order rather than building a rival order.”

The governments in Beijing and Moscow are closely following these developments, and can see where they are headed. The statement they released on Feb. 4 was their joint response, calling “for the establishment of a new kind of relationships between world powers on the basis of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation,” instead of conflict.

It is no coincidence that this meeting between Xi and Putin in Beijing — their first face-to-face reunion since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic — and the accompanying joint statement also came at a time of heightened tensions between NATO and Russia.

The manufactured crisis in Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, coupled with the Western bloc’s flagrant refusal to acknowledge any of Moscow’s security concerns, showed that NATO believes it has the right to permanently expand and militarily encircle Russia.

So while the joint declaration requested de-escalation, “reiterat[ing] the need for consolidation, not division of the international community, the need for cooperation, not confrontation,” it also emphasized that Beijing and Moscow are prepared to defend themselves.

The Eurasian powers stressed “that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the [first] Cold War era.”

‘Well-Being for All’

In an unambiguous reference to the foreign policy of the United States, the Chinese-Russian joint statement declared that Washington’s policies of unilateralism and interference only represent a “minority” and must end:

“Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.”

Beijing and Moscow juxtaposed these interventionist practices of U.S. imperialism with a proposal of multipolarity and “well-being for all”:

“[China and Russia] call on all States to pursue well-being for all and, with these ends, to build dialogue and mutual trust, strengthen mutual understanding, champion such universal human values as peace, development, equality, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries and the sovereignty and the security and development interests of States, to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.”

The declaration’s use of the phrase “international law-based world order” was important, because it was a rejection of the vague “rules-based international order” that the U.S. government has tried to impose on the world.

China’s and Russia’s ambassadors to the United States published a joint article in November 2021 that emphasized a similar point, writing:

“There is only one international system in the world, i.e. the international system with the United Nations at its core. There is only one international order, i.e. the one underpinned by international law. And there is only one set of rules, i.e. the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter. Flaunting the “rules-based international order” without referencing the U.N. and international law and attempting to replace international rules with the dictums of certain blocs falls into the category of revisionism and is obviously anti-democratic.

The February Chinese-Russian statement echoed much of what the ambassadors wrote in November, while further fleshing out the Eurasian perspective.”

Both declarations strongly defended democracy, but in a more comprehensive, expanded definition of the term that reflects real people’s democracy, not just a superficial system in which “people are only awakened when casting their votes and sent back to hibernation when the voting is over.”

In a strident rejection of the “liberal interventionist” ideology of the U.S. government, the Chinese-Russian statements condemned the cynical “abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

Strengthen International Institutions

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit 2015. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Beijing and Moscow hope to defend concepts like multilateralism, non-interference, and respect for national sovereignty by democratizing and strengthening international institutions such as the U.N., BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Eurasian Economic Union.

While calling “to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order,” the February Chinese-Russian statement urged a democratization of the body, to “seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council.”

Beijing and Moscow likewise wrote that they “aim to comprehensively strengthen the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and further enhance its role in shaping a polycentric world order based on the universally recognized principles of international law, multilateralism, equal, joint, indivisible, comprehensive and sustainable security.”

Moreover, the Eurasian powers said they “support the deepened strategic partnership within BRICS,” the framework bringing together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, to “promote the expanded cooperation in three main areas: politics and security, economy and finance, and humanitarian exchanges.”

Part of this global realignment also involves merging China’s massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, with the Eurasian Economic Union, the Russia-led economic bloc.

Beijing and Moscow wrote:

“The sides are seeking to advance their work to link the development plans for the Eurasian Economic Union [EAEU] and the Belt and Road Initiative with a view to intensifying practical cooperation between the EAEU and China in various areas and promoting greater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.

The sides reaffirm their focus on building the Greater Eurasian Partnership in parallel and in coordination with the Belt and Road construction to foster the development of regional associations as well as bilateral and multilateral integration processes for the benefit of the peoples on the Eurasian continent.”

Countering External Interference

Following the meeting between Presidents Xi and Putin on Feb. 4, China’s Foreign Ministry published a readout summarizing the main points of their discussions.

Implicitly criticizing the U.S. government’s superficial claims to support multilateralism and democracy, Beijing wrote,

“The two sides have taken an active part in the reform and development of the global governance system, followed true multilateralism, safeguarded the true spirit of democracy, and served as a bulwark in mobilizing global solidarity at these trying times and upholding international fairness and justice.”

The Chinese readout stressed this call for “international fairness and justice,” repeating the phrase three times.

Emphasizing the importance of “upholding sovereignty” and “defending sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Beijing added that the Eurasian powers must “effectively counter external interference” — an obvious reference to U.S. meddling and regime-change operations.

The message of the statements published by Beijing and Moscow could not have been clearer: the era of U.S. unipolar hegemony is dead, and the world is now in a “new era” with an international order based on multipolarity and principles of non-interference.

In making these declarations, the Eurasian powers were drawing an ideological line in the sand. The world already knew what political and economic model Washington, Brussels, and NATO are offering, but now it can clearly see what China and Russia are posing as an alternative.

Multipolarista.com via consortiumnews.com

“She [the United States] has seen that probably for centuries to come, contests of inveterate power, and emerging right [will persist]…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

– speech in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829), and the first American Ambassador to Russia in 1809.

This three part series will discuss how American foreign policy and ideology came to be what Eisenhower would refer to in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961 as the “military-industrial complex” that held whether sought or unsought, the power to acquire unwarranted influence, and that such a “power exists, and will persist,” leaving the following generations of Americans “a legacy of ashes,” for a once great nation.

This series will explain how in particular, the philosophy of the American establishment, including that of the military, formed their “understanding” of nuclear strategy which continues to influence thought today such as in the belief in the winnability of a limited nuclear war. It will also explain the reasons for why the Vietnam war was fought with the approach used as well as the War on Terror, and most importantly why.

A Foreign Attack on American Soil

On December 7th, 1941, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese navy, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178. However, the Americans would only begin their military air campaign against Japan by mid-1944.

General MacArthur estimated that a million Americans would die in only the first phase of the Pacific War. The Russians were being heavily courted by the Americans to break their Neutrality Pact with Japan and enter into the Pacific War for the very straightforward reason that fewer Americans would die.

After three years of the most savage warfare against the German Nazis, where over 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died, Russia was now prepared to enter into another war with Japan, only months later, to offer military support to the U.S., a country that had suffered minute losses in comparison.

When Admiral King, chief of naval operations, was informed that the Russians would definitely enter the fight against Japan, he was immensely relieved commenting “We’ve just saved two million Americans.”

* * *

On April 12th, 1945 President Roosevelt passed away and much of the American-Russian partnership with him.

On July 16th, 1945, the first successful atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Seven days later, Stalin was informed at the Potsdam conference by Truman that America now had the bomb.

Truman, contrary to what he was advised to do, made no mention of collaboration, no mention of making the world peaceful and safe, and no offer to share information with the Russians, not even in return for any quid pro quo. Simply that America now had the bomb.

On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

On August 9th at 1:00 am, one million Soviet troops crossed the border into eastern Manchuria to face the Kwantung, the culmination of ten months of coordinated planning. Later that same day a second atomic bomb, Fat Man (named after Churchill), was dropped on Nagasaki.

The Russians were completely taken aback. They had not been notified of this plan, and it was certainly not a “friendly” message that the U.S. was sending to their supposed allies.

On August 15th, six days later, Japan surrendered. Many historians have agreed that the Russian attack in Manchuria had the greater weight in causing the Japanese to surrender. (1) But it did not matter.

Most in the West would either never know or would soon forget about the Russian sacrifice.

The decision to drop the bomb, Truman would write in a letter to his daughter Margaret, was “no great decision…not any decision you would have to worry about.”

Nuclear physicist Yuli Khariton would voice a common Russian reaction when he wrote that the two bombs that were dropped on Japan were used “as atomic blackmail against the USSR, as a threat to unleash a new, even more terrible and devastating war,” if Russia refused to play by the rules decided for her.

By the end of WWII, the contrast between the United States and Soviet Union were enormous. The U.S. was supplying over half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, more than half of the world’s electricity, holding two-thirds of the world’s gold stocks and half of all the monetary reserves. It had suffered 405,000 casualties, 2.9 percent of its population (The size of the American population in 1945 was approximately 140 million).

Russia suffered 27 million casualties, 16 percent of its population. The Germans burned 70,000 Russian villages to the ground and destroyed 100,000 farms. Twenty-five million Russians were homeless. 32,000 factories and 65,000 railroad tracks were destroyed. And its major cities: Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow were in shambles.

The Godfather of RAND: Air Force General Curtis LeMay

“If we had lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

– Air Force General Curtis LeMay in “The Fog of War”

On October 1st, 1945, less than two months after the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, Commanding General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces, inspired by what the scientists under the Manhattan Project could do, met with Franklin R. Collbohm, Arthur E. Raymond, Donald Douglas, and Edward Bowles. This was the pioneering team that would create RAND.

Franklin R. Collbohm was the right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America’s largest airplane manufacturer, and the special assistant to Arthur E. Raymond, the company’s vice president and head of engineering. Edward Bowles, a consultant from MIT, worked with Collbohm on the notorious B-29 Special Bombardment Project against Japan in 1944.

After witnessing the atomic bomb, Arnold foresaw that the future in warfare would revolve around the technology of long-distance missiles and was adamant that only the Air Force and no other branch of armed forces should control the new weapon. Arnold pledged $10 million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and keep it running independently for a few years. (2) Collbohm nominated himself to head the group, which he did for the next 20 years.

Air Force Deputy Chief Curtis LeMay of Air Staff for Research and Development, was soon after brought in by General Arnold and tasked with supervising the new research group.

LeMay, whom it is said Kubrick based his military brass off of in “Dr. Strangelove,” was known for many military “feats” but the most notorious of these was when Arnold sent LeMay to the Mariana, to head the 21st Bomber Command that would execute the inhumane raids over Japanese cities in 1945.

It was there that LeMay first worked with Collbohm, Raymond and Bowles. It was because of Collbohm’s team that the B-29 bombers were able to inflict maximum damage. These incendiary bombs were dropped on the civilian population of Japan, burning alive hundreds of thousands of people. Homes, shops, and buildings of no apparent military value were consumed by the fiery rain that fell from the low-flying B-29s night after night.

This was the same tactic that had been used in Dresden by the European Allies, killing 25,000 civilians (3) but it had never before been used by the Americans who had up until this point avoided civilian populations.

As would occur during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the concept of the enemy was beginning to become blurred for the Americans. They were finding it harder and harder to combat a clearly defined opponent, rather, the “enemy” was increasingly looking like the vague unfamiliarity of an entire people, a whole population of seemingly soulless faces not like their own.

Unlike all the other countries involved in the world war, the Pearl Harbour attack was the first direct foreign offense against the United States other than the war of 1812. It did not matter how much more damage or destruction the Americans would inflict upon the Japanese in response to this, for it was justified as self-defence. An attempt to ensure that such an attack would never dare be repeated against the United States. It was an outlook that would continue on into the war arenas of Korea and Vietnam.

Because of the Pearl Harbor attack, many in the United States began to see large swaths of the world population like a swarming mountain of flesh-eating ants, wishing nothing more than to destroy American values and liberty. It was thought by many that the only way to save oneself and loved ones was to scourge the earth of them.

As General Arnold wrote, “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” (4)

Alex Abella writes in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“…the carpet bombing of Japan left the founding fathers of RAND and the future secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who also collaborated on the B-29 project – with the reputation of looking only to the practical aspect of a problem without concern for morality. Their numbers-driven perspective had the effect, intentional or not, of divorcing ethical questions from the job at hand. Eventually RAND doctrine would come to view scientists and researchers as facilitators, not independent judges. As LeMay himself said, ‘All war is immoral. If you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’ “

On March 1st, 1946, RAND had an official charter:

“Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” (5)

Unlike other government contractors, RAND would be exempt from reporting to a contracting command. Instead, the unfiltered results would be delivered straight to LeMay. (6)

Within a few years, a new mind-set would take hold in government: science, rather than diplomacy, could provide the answers needed to cope with threats to national security.

Rather than nationalize key military industries, as the UK and France had done, the U.S. government opted to contract out scientific research development to the private sector, which was not bounded by the Pentagon. RAND would be a bridge between the two worlds of military planning and civilian development.

And in a very real way, this great country with an island philosophy went into a fit of madness over the realisation that they were not invulnerable to an outside attack. This realisation, though they were to suffer minor losses compared to that in Europe and Asia during the two world wars, turned into a gaping wound of constant “what ifs,” a never-ending barrage of paranoid suppositions.

From then on, the United States would become obsessed with thwarting the next enemy attack, which they were certain was always in the works.

In Search of a Prophet: Enter the RAND Mathematicians

By March 1st, 1946 there were but four full-time RAND employees. Collbohm’s fifth hire to RAND was John Davis Williams who was to serve as director of the newly created Mathematics Division and would become Collbohm’s right-hand man. (7)

In 1947, Ed Paxson, a RAND engineer created the term “systems analysis” when Williams placed him in charge of the Evaluation of Military Worth Section. Paxson had been a scientific adviser to the U.S. Army Air Forces and a consultant to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945-46.

During WWII, the considered shortcomings of operational research (OR) was that it could not function without hard data, what was already known about a system.

As Alex Abella puts it in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend to the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet nuclear test RDS-1 was conducted, with the yield of 22 kilotons.

With this advent, there was mounting concern over what were the intentions of the Soviet bloc. Did they create their own atomic bomb as simply a defensive manoeuvre or was there the possibility they were planning an offensive?

In response to these questions, RAND put forward the doctrine of “rational choice theory,” developed by a 29 year old economist named Kenneth Arrow. The bulk of Arrow’s work at RAND is still classified top secret to this day. (8)

Arrow was tasked with establishing a collective “utility function” for the Soviet Union. In other words, “rational choice theory” meant to establish mathematically a fixed set of preferences in order to determine what were the best actions that would yield the greatest service to the Soviet leadership’s collective interests.

Since there was a lack of hard evidence, western policy makers became increasingly reliant on mathematical and also psychoanalytical speculation in order to create hypothetical scenarios, such that counter-strategies could be formed. RAND needed Arrow’s “utility function” so its analysts could simulate the actions of the Soviets during a nuclear conflict in order to justify increased funding and military buildup.

As long as somewhat complex mathematical explanations could be used to create such speculations, it was considered under the domain of “science,” and there was no need to cross-check the validity or accuracy of such speculations.

Arrow’s paradox, otherwise known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem, had demonstrated through a mathematical argument that collective rational group decisions are logically impossible.

Abella writes:

“Arrow utilized his findings to concoct a value system based on economics that destroyed the Marxist notion of a collective will. To achieve this result, Arrow borrowed freely from elements of positivist philosophy, such as its concern for axiomization, universally objective scientific truth and the belief that social processes can be reduced to interactions between individuals.” (9)

Arrow’s impossibility theorem lay a theoretical foundation for universal scientific objectivity, individualism and “rational choice.” That the so called “science,” in the form of a mathematical argument, has determined the collective is nothing, the individual is all.

And if we are all just reduced to our petty individual selfish self-interests, who is to challenge the players of the game who wish to shape the world stage?

As Abella phrased it, “Put in everyday terms, RAND’s rational choice theory is the Matrix code of the West.”

In 1950, William’s fascination with game theory peaked after the success of Arrow’s rational choice theory for RAND, and he hired John von Neumann, the father of game theory as a full-time staffer for RAND. Like Williams, von Neumann was an advocate of an all-out pre-emptive nuclear war on the Soviet Union. (10)

Together with Oskar Morgenstern, Neumann cowrote the book that lay the foundation for the field, “Theory Games and Economic Behavior,” published in 1944. Morgenstern and Neumann assumed that players in every game are rational (motivated by selfish self-interests) and that any given situation has a rational outcome. It was Neumann who coined the term “zero-sum game,” referring to a set of circumstances in which a player stands to gain only if his opponent loses.

By the mid-1950s, RAND became the world center for game theory.

Years later RANDites would ruefully acknowledge the futility of attempting to reduce human behavior to numbers. Yet, that has not deterred its continued use in military strategy as well as in numerous fields in academia to this day.

Out of the “science” of systems analysis, governed by a rational choice outlook, a plan to strike pre-emptively at the Soviet Union was born in the halls of RAND.

First Strike: The Revenge of the Technocrats

“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

– Bhagavad Gita

In seeking out further independence from its exclusive client the Air Force, RAND under the direction of Collbohm, would be reborn as a non-profit corporation.

1956. Rowan Gaither, the attorney who was drafting the RAND articles of incorporation, contacted the Ford Foundation about funding RAND. Gaither obtained not only close to half a million dollars from the Ford Foundation for RAND but he also became Ford Foundation’s president from 1953 to 1956. (11)

It was a steamy love affair in the midst of a Cold War. Ford Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization of the time and was in the process of reorganizing itself to lend financial support for world peace and the advancement of scientific knowledge. What better benefactor than RAND for such noble endeavours?

In a statement Gaither crafted after assuming the presidency of the Ford Foundation, he stated as his goal a society where technocrats ruled using objective analysis, stating:

“This very non-partisanship and objectivity gives the [Ford] foundation a great positive force, and enables it to play a unique and effective role in the difficult and sometimes controversial task of helping to realize democracy’s goals.” (12)

By 1950 administration policy had changed from the theory of containment advocated by George F. Kennan to open military competition. A notable RAND associate, Paul Nitze brought about that change almost single-handedly.

On January 1st, 1950, Paul Nitze replaced Kennan as head of the president’s Policy Planning Staff and wrote a memorandum for the NSC on how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age. The paper called NSC-68 warned apocalyptically about the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.”

NSC-68 declared that the U.S. was in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 (drafted January 20th, 1950) claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the United States.

President Truman accepted NSC 68 as the official policy and increased the national defense budget by almost $40 billion.

It is now known that such a prediction of the Soviet threat was indeed baseless, yet nonetheless, managed to create a deranged positive feedback loop in the ceaseless striving for the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. It entered the United States into the maniacal mindset that one must always have the greater firing power in order to have the greatest number of options in a nuclear scenario.

This was considered the only option, and not only put the Soviet Union in a difficult position, but the rest of the world as well, for who could withstand such a mighty force if it wished to inflict its will, let alone its paranoia, on any nation?

It is no wonder that the Soviet publication Pravda at this time (late 1950s) famously called RAND “the academy of science and death.” (13)

The Father of all technocrats at RAND, was Albert Wohlstetter.

Albert would be recruited into the dysfunctional RAND family in 1951 by Charles J. Hitch, the head of the RAND economics department. Within a very short period of time Albert would rise to the very top of the RAND food chain.

In achieving this king of the unruly jungle status, he first had to battle with RAND colleague Bernard Brodie. Brodie was an advocate of nuclear deterrence, he was the true developer of the “second-strike capability” doctrine as the ultimate agent of deterrence and the key to global stability in the thermonuclear age.

The only alternative to such mutually assured destruction, Brodie argued, was a fundamental shift in humanity’s understanding of warfare.

This thought had established Brodie in 1951 as a major strategist of nuclear war. However, this status was short-lived, in large part because he simply could not play the game as well as Albert. That is, Brodie did not understand something that was at the fundamental core of RAND philosophy, to “win” at all costs.

What was the game? To ascend and conquer…no matter the game and no matter the terms.

Albert endorsed the idea of creating a strategy for controlled and discriminate warfare in which nuclear weapons would play an active role. He would take Brodie’s second-strike stratagem and turn it into a justification for what he would term a “the delicate balance of terror.” Counterforce, Albert’s version of Brodie’s second-strike, advocated for engaging a gradual, precisely controlled use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets.

Insane? Yes.

Albert would put forward “Insofar as we can limit the damage to ourselves we reduce his [the Soviets] ability to deter us and, therefore, his confidence that we will not strike first. But decreasing his confidence in our not striking increases the likelihood of his doing so, since striking first is nearly always preferable to striking second. And so any attempt to contain the catastrophe if it comes also in some degree invites it.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Albert’s proposed theories or of the greater majority of those who worked at RAND, which was mostly made up of mathematicians devoid of hearts, the purpose of anything they do is simply to win, to get what is desired. Thus if a certain theory works in a certain case, use this theory, if not in another case, simply use another theory.

They view the world quite literally as a game. It is all about justifying the means to the goal in which you ultimately seek for. It is like starting with the desired answer and working backwards to justify the proof and hypothesis.

Albert argued for an American strategy based on “possibilities”— the entire spectrum of enemy options, both rational and irrational — rather than “probabilities,” the latter being the dominant characteristic in game theory.

Ron Robin writes in his “The Cold World They Made”:

“Albert now rejected that premise [of rational theory], proposing instead a theory of ‘limited irrationality,’ the notion that when faced with existential dilemmas, ‘people aren’t always irrational.’ One had to prepare for contingencies based on the assumption that the enemy may behave irrationally in contemplating a nuclear strike, but that the enemy is also ‘sometimes rational enough to be able to see that there is a grossly greater danger in taking the course of using nuclear weapons than if he takes the next course.’”

It is like a short-circuiting to the mentally constipated challenge of the so-called “prisoner’s dilemma,” in the end even game theorists said all options were “rational,” and couldn’t even agree which option was more rational vs. irrational.

For Albert, the Soviets were entirely to blame for the Cold War due to their assumed aggressive motives and predatory behavior, rather than the fact that the atomic bomb was created by the Americans in the first place.

Albert’s Soviets were cruel despots who would willingly sacrifice tens of millions of their citizens for the price of strategic advantage and world domination. Thus, it was the responsibility of the United States to prevent such a calamity as their primary objective, and that this could only be achieved, according to Albert, through an unrelenting investment in nuclear arms development and improvement.

Fred Kaplan writes in his “The Wizards of Armageddon”:

“Echoing his colleague Herman Kahn, he [Albert] wondered what the difference was ‘between two such unimaginable disasters as sixty and 160 million Americans dead? The only answer to that is ‘100 million.’ Starting from the smaller losses, it would be possible to recover the industrial and political power of the United States. Even smaller differences would justify an attempt to reduce the damage to our society in the event of war.’” (14)

According to Albert, the 25 million sacrifice of the Soviets in fighting WWII was nothing valiant or noble, but rather showed how coldly and callously the Soviet leadership regarded their own people that they could sacrifice them, without any apparent concern, into the burning furnace of war as nothing but cheap fuel for the military engine.

Ironically (or perhaps not…), this Soviet monstrosity that Albert had convinced himself, was used as the very justification for Albert’s push towards a nuclear confrontation, that would sacrifice many more lives.

Strangely Albert justifies the sacrifice of what he ultimately regards as just a number, whether it be 60 or 160 million (the population size of the U.S. in 1954 was 161,881,000). Thus, the possibility of 100 million Americans dead as the number Albert lands upon, was at the time 62% of the American population. This is not even taking into account how many Russians would die in such a scenario.

It appears what Albert is saying is that the United States is justified in becoming the greatest monstrosity in the world such that it can end all other monstrosities, whether real or merely speculative.

However, we are expected to believe that our sacrifice and murder in such numbers will be the most noble of all?

Together, Paul Nizte, Albert and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter (all RAND associates) would dominate the theory and policy surrounding nuclear strategy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Nov. 1985, Reagan would award all three with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Roberta, an authority on the “academic historical” work around the attack on Pearl Harbour and the psychological uses this had, had great insight into what could stir the sleeping madness that slumbered within the most powerful nation in the world.

Her work was used, by Albert and others at RAND, in scare-mongering and manipulating the mind-set of the military and the American population into thinking another Pearl Harbour was always just around the corner. It would be the foundation upon which Albert based all of his “hypotheses” and “revelations” in nuclear strategy.

It is difficult not to wonder where America would be today in its understanding of Russia along with its relations and orientation in nuclear policy if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of American nuclear strategy, had been exposed as a “former” Trotskyist…

[Shortly to follow: Part 2 of this series titled “Albert Wohlstetter’s ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’: The Story of How a Trotskyist Became the Authority on Nuclear Strategy for America.”]

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com

(1) Susan Butler, Portrait of a Partnership: Roosevelt and Stalin
(2) Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason, pg 13
(3) Ibid, pg 18
(4) Ibid, pg 10
(5) Ibid, pg 14
(6) Ibid, pg 14
(7) Ibid, pg 21
(8) Ibid, pg 49
(9) Ibid, pg 51
(10) Ibid, pg 53
(11) Ibid, pg 32
(12) Ibid, pg 32
(13) Ibid, pg 92
(14) Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pg 368

We’re being bashed in the face with western propaganda about the Ukraine situation with increasing forcefulness. Every day now we’re seeing things like “analysts” claiming Putin definitely wants a large-scale war, very familiar-looking puff pieces about Ukrainian guerrilla freedom fighters based on claims by anonymous intelligence sources, think pieces on why Americans should all care about Ukrainian freedom from Kremlin tyranny, and, of course, a lot of entirely unsubstantiated assertions about what Russia is doing.

Despite the British government’s evidence-free claim that Russia was planning to install a puppet regime in Ukraine being debunked within hours and then shown to be a US intelligence claim dishonestly packaged as a British one days later, mass media outlets still to this day repeat the allegation like it’s a real thing. Despite the entirely unevidenced US government claim that Russia was plotting to stage a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine failing to prove true in subsequent weeks, US Senator Bob Menendez went on CNN over the weekend and declared that this false flag which never actually, physically happened was grounds to sanction Russia effective immediately.

The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong, and that they will in fact see their stars rise as a reward for advancing the interests of the US empire.

The CBC suggests “Russian actors” are behind the #TruckersForFreedom convoy. Seriously. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/a6sQyWtKkx

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) January 29, 2022

So they’re just churning out all these plot hole-riddled stories about hordes of Russian troops being on the verge of a full-scale Ukraine invasion with complete indifference to what’s actually happening and the reality on the ground. And people are lapping it right up. My social media notifications are full of people calling me a Kremlin operative for disputing the official line about Russia and Ukraine as this barrage of mass-scale psychological manipulation washes over our entire civilization.

It’s interesting how in all the talk about “media literacy” over the last few years and the push to teach the public to distinguish between real news and fake news, the overwhelming majority of the mainstream public has remained blissfully unaware that it’s actually bad practice to swallow unevidenced assertions by western government officials about countries the US doesn’t like. Despite this government’s extensive and thoroughly documented history of lying to us about exactly this sort of thing over and over again for generation after generation, it’s still considered perfectly normal and acceptable to just deep throat whatever it tells us to believe without the slightest twinge of gag reflex.

So this is just a quick, friendly reminder while all this Ukraine stuff is happening that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim, and that any claim that has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. This applies to individuals, and it most certainly applies to untrustworthy governments as well.

When the corporate media pushes for war, one of its main weapons is propaganda by omission.

In the case of Ukraine, it omits history of NATO expansion, the US role in the 2014 coup, and the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian military.https://t.co/3KXETrRwmC

— John McEvoy (@jmcevoy_2) January 31, 2022

The epistemological razor “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” is generally attributed to Christopher Hitchens, who ironically has a rather significant history of failing to follow his own advice when it comes to claims made by western government agencies. But that’s precisely when it is most important to take Hitchens’s razor to heart: not when you’re arguing with someone about whether or not God exists, but when a very consequential claim is being made by the most powerful people on our planet.

Anything that’s been asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It’s true of arguments, it’s true of government claims, and it’s especially true of claims coming from governments that we know for a fact make false claims all the time.

What this means is that a simple “Nah” is all that’s required whenever you’re presented with these claims, or if you’re feeling particularly generous a “Proof or it didn’t happen.” If anyone objects to your low-energy dismissal of their parroting claims by western governments, simply tell them that what has been put forward without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. They might want you to try to prove their position wrong, but that ain’t how the burden of proof works, buttercup.

Hitchens’s razor. It slices. It dices. It wins arguments. It keeps the news man from turning your brain into clam chowder. Use it, and use it often.

caityjohnstone.medium.com