Tag: NATO

75 Years of NATO: A History of Coups, Wars and Terror / by Nikos Mottas

Image credit: IDC

Reposted from In Defense of Communism

The 4th of April marked the 75th anniversary since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty by 12 countries in Washington DC. The pretext for the foundation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the protection from “Soviet aggression” as well as the – supposed – consolidation of peace in the severely injured by the Second World War European continent. However, as history showed, the actual reasons behind the alliance’s establishment had nothing to do with defense or peace. 

Although NATO was officially created in 1949, the idea of its birth had already been prepared several years ago. In fact, in his emblematic speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill set the basis for the formation of an anti-communist military “Holy Alliance” against the Soviet Union and the socialist countries. Talking about the “Iron Curtain which lies across Europe”, Churchill had underlined that “the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” (1).

A year later, on 12 March 1947, in a speech before the U.S Congress, President Truman presented his famous doctrine over American foreign policy that pledged “US support for democracies against authoritarian threats”. Concerning the significance of the Truman Doctrine, the notorious Henry Kissinger wrote: “Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the president was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of realpolitik Stalin understood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both” (2).

Days before the official foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Soviet Union had warned about the alliance’s aggressive character. On 31 March 1949, in a memorandum addressed to the governments of the United States, Western Europe and Canada, the Soviet Union was pointing out the following conclusions (3):

1) The North Atlantic Treaty has nothing in common with the aims of self-defense of the states parties to the Treaty but on the contrary, this Treaty has a clearly aggressive character and is directed against the USSR.
2) The North Atlantic Treaty not only does not contribute to the strengthening of peace and international security which is the obligation of all members of the United Nations organization but is in direct contradiction with the principles and aims of the UNO Charter and leads to the undermining of the United Nations Organization.
3) The North Atlantic Treaty is in contradiction with several agreements signed between the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Great Britain and France in 1942, 1944 and 1945 under which the signatory parties agreed “not to conclude any alliance and not to participate in any coalition directed against one of the Contracting Parties.” (3)


From their side, the U.S and their allies never provided an answer to the Soviet concerns about NATO’s actual character. On the contrary, they set in motion a multifaceted  propaganda of presenting the North Atlantic Treaty as a “project of peace”. From his side, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first General Secretary, is credited as having said that the purpose of NATO  was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the American in and the Germans down”.

Based on the above, the obvious question that arises about the foundation of NATO is the following: If the North Atlantic Treaty was indeed created as a counterbalance of the capitalist states to the “Soviet threat”, then why it wasn’t self-dissolved after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the de facto cancellation of the Warsaw Pact?

What was the purpose of NATO’s existence after 1990, as long as the socialist camp ceased to exist? The answer is simple: NATO was never a “defensive alliance” but an imperialist organization, aimed at safeguarding and expanding the interests of its capitalist member-states throughout the world. In 1916, more than four decades before NATO’s establishment, V.I. Lenin had described the prospect of an imperialist alliance: “The imperialist tendency towards big empires is fully achievable, and in practice is often achieved, in the form of an imperialist alliance of sovereign and independent—politically independent—states. Such an alliance is possible and is encountered not only in the form of an economic merger of the finance capital of two countries, but also in the form of military “co-operation” in an imperialist war” (4).

The victory of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the beginning of 1990s provided the “green light” for the new, more aggressive role of NATO. Imperialism, led by the United States and its allies, proceeded to a new phase of interventions and wars, something that was expressed in the infamous “New World Order” proclaimed by U.S President George H. W. Bush. This “new order” essentially reflected the common strategy of the U.S and Western Europe bourgeois classes to reap the fruits of counterrevolution, to extend the rule of monopolies in new regions, to find new natural resources and new cheap labor for exploitation.

Dictatorships and Fascist Coups

NATO’s bloodstained history isn’t marked only by imperialist wars. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is supposedly based among others on the ideals of “democracy” and “liberalism”, bears significant responsibility for supporting, or at least tolerating, the imposition of fascist regimes in a series of states, including some of its members! The cases of Portugal, Greece and Turkey are indicative.

Portugal was already under the “Estado Novo” dictatorship, led by Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, when it became one of the founding signatories of NATO in 1949. Despite the deeply authoritarian character of the Salazar dictatorship, the Portuguese government didn’t experience isolation from the western capitalist states. On the contrary, acknowledging the role of the Portuguese dictatorship as an ally in the Cold War against Communism, the country became one of the 12 founding members of NATO.

Greece, which was a focus point of the Truman Doctrine, became a NATO member on 18 February 1952. The imposition of the seven-year Junta, following the April 1967 military Coup, didn’t affect the country’s NATO membership at all. Furthermore, the imperialist alliance tolerated, if not indirectly encouraged, the Turkish invasion in Cyprus in July 1974 which led to the partition of the island.

Like Greece, neighboring Turkey joined NATO on February 1952. For the U.S and its western European allies, Turkey had been a valuable ally mainly due to its strategic location at the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. That explains why NATO remained silent towards successive authoritarian governments, including the one of Adnan Menderes and the 1980 military Coup by General Kenan Evren.

NATO is certainly not free of blame for a series of imperialist involvement, mainly led by the United States, in forced regime change in various countries. Some of the cases include: Congo-Leopoldville (1960-65), Dominican Republic (1961), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965-66), Chile (1973), Angola (1975-91), East Timor (1975-1999), Argentina (1976), Chad (1981), Nicaragua (1981-90), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989-94), etc.

Imperialist barbarism “from Vancouver to Vladivostok”

On the 50th anniversary of NATO, the Washington Summit held in April 1999, at the height of the criminal bombing of Yugoslavia, ratified a revised version of the alliance’s “Strategic Concept”. According to the then Secretary General, Javier Solana, the Washington Summit was based “on the lessons learned by NATO from the management of complex crisis, such as the ones in Bosnia-Herzegovina and more recently in Kosovo. It will reflect the experience we have gained in developing highly complex models of communication an cooperation with literally all the countries located in the Euro-Atlantic region which stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok”. In fact, the new Strategic Concept extended the activity of NATO far beyond “Europe’s safety”, turning the alliance into a global sheriff of imperialism.

In Spring 1999, NATO committed the last massacre of the 20th Century; the imperialist intervention and bombing of Yugoslavia, where more than 2,000 civilians were killed. Two years later, the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in the United States provided the necessary pretext (“War against Terrorism”) for the imperialist attack in Afghanistan, a war that lasted almost 20 years and led to thousands of dead civilians, millions of displaced people and the destruction of a whole country. Following two decades of NATO’s devastating military presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban recaptured Kabul in 2021. Another country which experienced the imperialist barbarism of the North Atlantic alliance was Libya in 2011, a war which resulted to more than 30,000 deaths, 4,000 missing persons and more than 50,000 wounded civilians.

The process of NATO’s transformation into a global watchdog of western imperialism’s interests has been reflected in the decisions of several important summits; in the 2002 Prague Summit seven states, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were invited to begin accession talks, while the alliance set the basis for the planning of the NATO Response Force (NRF). The following Summits, especially those of Istanbul (2004), Riga (2006) and Lisbon (2010) contributed to the further enhancement of NATO’s aggressive military capabilities by elaborating and finally adopting a revised “Strategic Concept”.

The continuous expansion of NATO to the East has led to the rapid sharpening of the inter-imperialist competition with Russia and China, which are the two major powers of the Eurasian imperialist camp that is being formed. The ongoing war in Ukraine is a reflection of this competition, while NATO continues to concentrate military forces and perform military drills in Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries and the Baltic Sea thus adding more fuel to the fire of the confrontation. The recent accession of Sweden to the alliance is definitely an extremely negative development, the effects of which will become visible in the upcoming future.

NATO’s leading powers also bear huge responsibility for the bloodshed that currently takes place in the Middle East, mainly by encouraging and actually supporting Israeli government’s massacre in Gaza, leading to more than 32,000 dead Palestinians since October 2023. The extremely dangerous situation that has been formed for the region’s peoples is a result of the imperialist plans for the “New Middle East”, which have been designed for years by the Euro-Atlantic powers.

Unyielding struggle against NATO

Today, 75 years since the foundation of NATO, the struggle against the imperialist alliance is more timely than ever. More and more people throughout Europe and the world understand that NATO isn’t a force that produces “peace and democracy” but the armed arm of Euro-Atlantic monopoly capitalism. Therefore, the struggle against NATO shouldn’t be simply a slogan but a contemporary and necessary revolutionary task, not only of communists, but of every honest working man and woman who loves peace and people’s prosperity.

This revolutionary task shouldn’t, in any case, be handed over to various reactionary groups, like the Taliban or Hezbollah, which are linked, one way or another, to imperialist interests, or to bourgeois, anti-communist regimes, like for example Putin’s Russia or Khamenei’s Iran. The working masses must not be entrapped in deeply erroneous, opportunistic, anti-leninist theories which treat imperialism as an aggressive foreign policy and deliberately underestimate, or even ignore, its economic essence, that is the monopoly.

The perception of “supporting the least aggressive imperialist” is a blatant distortion of Lenin’s theory and against the popular interests. Indeed, NATO is the most criminal, the most barbaric imperialist alliance since the Second World War with dozens of bloody interventions in the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa. Indeed, the U.S governments, with the complicity of the EU, have been and remain the number one enemy for human peace. Yes, the struggle against the imperialist alliances of NATO and the EU is more timely and necessary than ever. But all these do not negate, for example, the objective role of capitalist Russia as a powerful imperialist power that competes with the Euro-Atlantic bloc. And as such, an imperialist power, Russia is also an enemy of the people’s interests.

The contemporary struggle against NATO and the Euro-Atlantic imperialism cannot have a generalized and vague “anti-imperialist” context focused merely on foreign policy but must contain an anti-monopoly, anti-capitalist direction. It can’t be detached from class exploitation. Only the organized struggle of the working people towards the overthrow of capitalist barbarism can lead to the defeat of imperialism. In the 21st century, Lenin’s words remain more timely than ever: “Only a proletarian communist revolution can lead humanity out of the deadlock created by imperialism and imperialist wars. No matter what difficulties the revolution may have to encounter and in spite of temporary failure of waves of counter-revolution the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable. (5)”

(1) Iron Curtain Speech, 5/4/1946: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/ 

(2) Henry Kissinger, Reflections on Containment, Foreign Affairs, 01/05/1994: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1994-05-01/reflections-containment

(3) Text of the Soviet Memorandum on the Atlantic Pact, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/040149nato-soviet-text.html

(4) V.I. Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, The Example of Norway, 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/carimarx/4.htm

(5) The 1919 Lenin Program of the CPSU (Bolsheviks). https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol22/no04/rcpb.html

Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.   

Who Is to Blame for the War in Ukraine? / by Donald A. Smith

Anti-war protesters gather in front of the White House to demonstrate against escalating tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine on January 27, 2022, in Washington, D.C. | Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

NATO expansion provoked the very conflict that is now being touted as justification for said expansion.

Here are four views about the war in Ukraine, listed in order of increasing cynicism about U.S. culpability for the crisis:

  1. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was totally unprovoked, and the U.S. response was a noble defense of democracy and of the rules-based international order. Ukraine had a right to ally with the West and had a legitimate fear of Russian aggression (as do Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example).
  2. NATO expansion into Ukraine and other countries near Russia was reckless, because Russia had made it clear to diplomats that it considered Ukraine off-limits to NATO. America bears some responsibility for provoking the crisis, because it should have been obvious to policymakers that their trying to expand NATO into Ukraine would lead to a war. But the Ukrainians had the desire and the right to align with the West, and so U.S. intentions were noble.
  3. The U.S. and NATO failed to respect the divisions in Ukraine between pro-Western and pro-Russian provinces and groups, and the U.S. failed to respect Russia’s legitimate security concerns—e.g., not to have a hostile country along its borders that was attacking Russian speakers in the East. But the U.S. did not want a war.
  4. The U.S. exploited divisions in Ukraine, launched a regime change operation, and armed anti-Russian militias in order to intentionally provoke a war. The aim was to weaken Russia, increase European dependence on the U.S. (both militarily and economically), and enrich U.S. arms and energy industries. The U.S. couldn’t care less about Ukrainian (or Russian) lives lost.

I devised these four views during discussions with my member of Congress, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash., no relation), who is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee and former chair. He, of course, believes view #1 and thinks that NATO expansion was needed to deter Russian aggression. But he told me that view No. 2 is plausible though wrong.

If you believe the official narrative coming out of D.C. and out of most of mainstream media, you too will think that view No. 1 is correct and that the U.S. is as innocent in the crisis as a newborn baby.

Given the history of U.S. lies and aggression with respect to foreign policy and with respect to overseas interventions, one would have to be naive indeed to believe view No. 1.

I believe the evidence points to view No. 4 being correct: The U.S. intentionally provoked a war. But it is possible that view No. 3 is closer to the truth, and that ideological fervor led the architects of U.S. policy in Ukraine to be blinded to the obvious likely results of their policies; however, that seem unlikely, because both diplomats and the RAND Corporation had told policymakers that trying to expand NATO into Ukraine would lead to war.

My reasons for holding view No. 4 are documented in “Senior U.S. diplomats, Journalists, Academics, and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine.” In short:

  • There were stark divisions within Ukraine between pro-Western and pro-Russian provinces and groups—divisions that the U.S. exploited to provoke a crisis.
  • The U.S. aided the 2014 government overthrow in Ukraine that replaced a Russia-friendly government with one subservient to the West. Former U.S. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, and lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, says the U.S. “engineered” the 2014 coup.
  • The U.S. allied with and armed far-right, anti-Russian militias Azov, Sovboda, and Right Sektor that were attacking Russian speakers in the East and that had been widely condemned in U.S. media and by Congress prior to 2022.
  • The CIA was deeply involved (see this and this) and worked hard to hide its tracks (a broad “effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many ‘sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters’”).
  • Senior U.S. diplomats warned that NATO expansion into Ukraine and other former Soviet block countries was unnecessary and risky.
  • The U.S. stymied peace deals between Russia and Ukraine that could have prevented or ended the war. See also this and this.
  • The U.S. has a history of launching regime change operations, via both economic and military means, throughout the world, but in particular against Russian allies (e.g., Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria, and Libya). Russia’s invasion was along its borders and involved a country with deep historical and linguistic ties to Russia. The U.S. often allies with terrorist groups to achieve its aims. The U.S. currently occupies one-third of the sovereign nation of Syria with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. We were told that the U.S. invasion in Yugoslavia was a noble defense of innocent people. It has since been revealed (see this and this) that the Kosovo Liberation Army was, basically, a terrorist organization armed by the CIA. When the Serbians tried to defend themselves, the U.S. accused them of engaging in war crimes. Some U.S. allies in the Kosovo war were later convicted of war crimes.

In the view of Rep. Smith, NATO expansion was necessary to prevent Russia from taking over not only Ukraine but also the Baltic states. (Likewise, he thinks that U.S. military actions near China are needed to deter Chinese aggression in Taiwan.) My view is that NATO expansion provoked the very war that is now being touted as justification for said expansion.

Despite the CIA’s valiant efforts, many of the facts about what happened in Ukraine are available to the public. It’s quite amazing that—so soon after the ignoble end to the disastrous 20-year war in Afghanistan—mainstream media, Congress, and most of the public have been so easily bamboozled by government propaganda into supporting yet another disastrous, avoidable war. The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people; displaced millions of people from their homes; devastated Ukrainian infrastructure; greatly increased military budgets in Europe, the U.S., and Russia (money sorely needed for climate mitigation and other urgent exigencies); increased inflation and shortages worldwide; and increased the risk of World War III and nuclear annihilation. Moreover, it’s a war that Russia is now winning—a fact that increases the risk of escalation.

A negotiated end to the war in Ukraine is urgently needed.

Donald A. Smith is a writer, a peace activist working with CodePink, a Democratic Precinct Committee officer, the editor of http://waliberals.org, and the creator of https://progressivememes.org. He lives in Bellevue, Washington, and has a PhD in Computer Science.

Workers rise up against Finland’s right-wing pro-NATO government / by Mark Gruenberg and John Wojcik

Workers take part in the ‘Stop Now!’ demonstration against Finland’s right-wing government’s labor market policies in Helsinki’s Senate Square. | Vesa Moilanen / Lehtikuva via AP

Reposted from Peoples World

HELSINKI, Finland—Shades of the far-right British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher more than 40 years ago: After just over a year in office, Finland’s right-wing, pro-NATO Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, a supporter of sending weapons to Ukraine, is trying to bust Finnish unions through wide curbs on workers’ rights.

The Scandinavian nation’s unions have responded with politically oriented general strikes, after realizing that trying to bargain with Orpo’s government is futile. In the United Kingdom during Thatcher’s reign, the Trades Union Congress never even got that chance. The then-weak Labor Party helped little.

With a wide Tory majority in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, Thatcher easily pushed through a series of measures penalizing any unions that struck, and enacting many other curbs. That’s what Orpo is doing, too. The legislation and the strikes in response were first reported in the U.S. in Harvard University’s On Labor blog

The Finnish strikes, involving whole sectors of workers, began early this year, and were suspended on April 8 for a week, except for strikes already planned, the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) announced. The latest round of political strikes sent an estimated 7,000 workers out.

They were members of the Industrial Union, the Finnish Transport Workers’ Union AKT, the Service Union United PAM, the Finnish Construction Trade Union, the Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors JHL, and the Electrical Workers’ Union. They’re still on strike, SAK added.

SAK is “willing to call off the strikes at any time if the government shows some appreciation for the concerns of employees,” SAK President Jarkko Eloranta said. “The executive board will meet again to review the situation and any further continuation of industrial action after Easter.”

This kind of action by labor was unthinkable during the many years of Finish neutrality and refusal to become part of the U.S.-backed NATO block. Finland was known for many of the best social programs in the world. The country openly boasted, for example, of having copied its advanced and free childcare program from the one in place in East Germany before the defeat of socialism in that country, the German Democratic Republic. Now that the U.S.-backed pro-NATO government has taken over workers are fighting to maintain what many took for granted for so many years.

A heavily big-business financed campaign in favor of NATO membership for Finland, when war broke out in Ukraine, contributed to the election of the new right-wing government. The International Trade Union Confederation has a four-word description of the situation in Finland: “Worse than last year.”

“We have sought a fair and moderate approach from the government,” Finnish labor leader Eloranta said in a statement on SAK’s website. Orpo’s government “has turned a deaf ear to employee organizations and is still seeking to implement several industrial policy goals with negative consequences for workers.”

Sympathy strikes curbed

Those “negative consequences” include limiting “sympathy strikes” where one union can strike in support of another and limiting political strikes to 24 hours coupled with high fines against both unions and individual workers who break that limit.

The government’s legislation would virtually junk sectoral bargaining in favor of a combination of local company-by-company bargaining and pattern bargaining, with the industrial exporters setting the “pattern” and actual wage limits, for everyone else.

“Curtailing the right to strike reduces the ability of workers to seek better working conditions. Expanding local collective bargaining is a major deregulation of the world of work that will bring poverty wages and unacceptable terms and conditions to some jobs,” Eloranta observes.

And non-union reps could sign on, on management’s side, to the local contracts, SAK notes. That would set up potential company “yellow unions.”

The union federation adds that Orpo’s government already weakened the nation’s social safety net, “which in turn harms worker bargaining power.” The government reduced jobless benefits, limited financial aid for adult education for unemployed workers, and reduced paid sick leave.

“Last year, the current government…immediately adopted the employers’ decentralization agenda. This has resulted in a policy package tailored to the demands of the main employer and business confederations, and especially to interests of the export-oriented manufacturing industry,” SAK says.

“Many of these goals will have no impact on employment or on the balance of public finances,” the reason the Prime Minister gives for his anti-worker legislation, SAK President Eloranta adds.

Besides the anti-worker legislation, the new right-wing Finnish government pushed “another round of brutal social welfare cuts” through parliament, the union confederation said. Eloranta calculated those cuts, which began April 1, “will plunge an additional 100,000 adults and 17,000 children into poverty.”

“The social welfare cuts are already forcing many people on low incomes to move out of their homes,” Eloranta adds, saying Orpo plans even more slashes “which will visit even greater hardship on ordinary workers.”

A SAK-commissioned public opinion poll in February of 2,500 people found a 51%-42% margin favoring the politically oriented strikes. In a further indication of popular sentiment, some 13,000 Finns jammed a February 1 protest in the main square of the capital city of Helsinki, disregarding both overcast winter conditions and the very short span of daylight.

Finland has long been known for its progressive pro-worker policies, comparable to those of its Scandinavian neighbors, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Still, its union density rate fell from 74% in 2000 to 59%–pre-pandemic—in 2019, International Labor Organization data shows. U.S. union density that year was 10.3%, just below the worldwide average of 11.2%.

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Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

The Urgency of Diplomacy / by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Stop the War protesters demonstrate against the threat of nuclear war in North East Asia, near Downing Street on September 28, 2017 in London, England | Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images

Now is the time for talks that will bring us closer to peace and away from a deadly and destructive war with no end in sight.

Reposted from Common Dreams

There has been a complete collapse of diplomacy between the US and Russia, and a near-total collapse between the US and China. Europe, which has made itself far too dependent on the US for its own good, simply follows the Washington line. The absence of diplomacy creates a dynamic of escalation that can lead to nuclear war. The highest priority for global peace is to re-establish US diplomacy with Russia and China.

The state of affairs is encapsulated by President Joe Biden’s incessant personal insults of his Russian and Chinese counterparts. Instead of focusing on policy, Biden focuses on the personal vis-à-vis President Vladimir Putin. Recently, he referred to President Putin as “a crazy SOB.” In March 2022, he stated that “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Just after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last fall, Biden called him a “dictator.”

This crude personalization of complex superpower relations is inimical to peace and problem solving. Moreover, the crudity of this rhetoric and absence of serious diplomacy has opened the floodgates of shocking rhetorical irresponsibility. The President of Latvia recently tweeted “Russia delenda est” (“Russia must be destroyed”), paraphrasing the ancient refrain of Cato the Elder in calling for the destruction of Carthage by Rome prior to the Third Punic War.

At one level, these utterly puerile statements all recall the admonition of President John F. Kennedy, who drew the most important lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the need to avoid humiliating a nuclear-armed adversary: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But there is an even deeper problem at hand. All of US foreign policy is currently based on asserting the motives of the counterparts rather than actually negotiating with them. The US refrain is that the other side can’t be trusted to negotiate, so that it’s not worth trying.

Negotiations today are denounced as pointless, untimely, and a show of weakness. We are repeatedly told that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to negotiate with Hitler in 1938, but that Hitler tricked him, and that the very same would happen with negotiations today. To underscore the point, every US adversary is branded as a new Hitler — Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and others – so any negotiation would be in vain.

The problem is that this trivialization of history and of today’s conflicts is leading us to the brink of nuclear war. The world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before – 90 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock – because the nuclear superpowers aren’t negotiating. And the US has actually become the least diplomatic of all UN member states, comparing the states according to adherence to the UN Charter.

Diplomacy is vital because most conflicts are what game theorists call “strategic dilemmas.” A strategic dilemma is a situation in which peace (or, more generally, cooperation) is better for both adversaries but in which each side has the incentive to cheat on a peace agreement in order to take advantage of the foe. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, peace was better for both the US and the Soviet Union than nuclear war, but each side feared that if it agreed to a peaceful outcome, the other side would cheat – for example through a nuclear first-strike.

The keys to peace in such cases are mechanisms for compliance. Or as President Ronald Reagan said of negotiating with the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, repeating an old Russian maxim, “Trust but verify.”

There are many mechanisms for building trust. At a basic level, the two sides can remind each other that they are in a “repeated game,” meaning that strategic dilemmas are regularly arising between them. If one side cheats today, that kills the chance for cooperation in the future. But there are many additional mechanisms for enforcement: formal treaties, third-party guarantees, systematic monitoring, phased agreements, and the like.

JFK was confident that the agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis that he negotiated with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 would stick – and it did. He was later confident that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he negotiated with Khrushchev in July 1963 would also stick – and it did. As JFK noted about such agreements, they depend on negotiating an agreement that is in the mutual interest of both parties: “Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours — and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”

Game theorists have studied strategic dilemmas for more than 70 years now, most famously the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They have repeatedly found that a key path to cooperation in a strategic dilemma is through dialogue, even non-binding dialogue. The human interaction dramatically raises the likelihood of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Was Chamberlain wrong to negotiate with Hitler in Munich in 1938? No. He was wrong on the specifics, reaching an ill-advised agreement that Hitler did not intend to honor and then naively proclaiming “peace for our time.” Yet even so, Chamberlain’s negotiation with Hitler ultimately contributed to Hitler’s defeat. By plainly exposing Hitler’s perfidy to the world, the failed Munich agreement paved the way for a resolute Winston Churchill to take power in Britain, with deep vindication and with deep wellsprings of public support in Britain and worldwide, and then ultimately for the UK-US-Soviet alliance to defeat Hitler.

The repeated analogy to 1938 is in any event utterly simplistic, and in some ways even backward. The war in Ukraine requires real negotiation among the parties – Russia, Ukraine, and the US – to address issues such as NATO enlargement and mutual security of all parties to the conflict. These issues pose true strategic dilemmas, meaning that all parties – the US, Russia, and Ukraine — can come out ahead by ending the war and reaching a mutually satisfactory outcome.

Moreover, it has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. The US violated its solemn pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. The US cheated by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. The US, Germany, France, and the UK, duplicitously refused to back the Minsk II agreement. The US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. The US refused to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.

There has in fact been no direct diplomacy between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the UK and US stepped in to block an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Putin reiterated Russia’s openness to negotiations in his interview with Tucker Carlson last month and did so again more recently.

The war rages on, with hundreds of thousands dead and with hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction. We are coming closer to the nuclear abyss. It’s time to talk.In the immortal words and wisdom of JFK in his Inaugural Address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Ten years since the Euromaidan in Ukraine: Revolution or foreign-backed Coup? / by Nikos Mottas

Photo via IDC

Reposted from In Defense of Communism

This February marked the tenth anniversary since the so-called “Euromaidan” events in Ukraine and the subsequent coup d’ etat which, backed by the US and the EU, led to the overthrow of the then pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. 

Apart from the rise of far-right, reactionary forces in Ukraine’s political leadership, the 2014 coup became the starting point for the 2022 Russian military invasion and the ongoing imperialist war. 

The Euro-Atlantic forces have since tried to present the 2014 events in Ukraine as a “democratic revolution” against Yanukovich government. Officially the then events are called as “Revolution of Dignity”. However all facts point that Euromaidan was nothing but a flagrant intervention of the US, NATO and EU in Ukraine’s internal affairs, as a part of their broader inter-imperialist competition with capitalist Russia. This intervention was the spark that ignited a chain of events that led to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the so-called “Special Military Operation” in February 2022.

The background and the coup

Socialist Ukraine, formally the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. Since then, the emerging bourgeoisie, made up by capitalists, neo-oligarchs and various counterrevolutionaries, was divided into two major sections: One part linked its interests with the Euro-Atlantic bloc while another one decided to side with capitalist Russia.

This intra-bourgeois competition, which escalated through the 1990s and 2000s, reached a peak in November 2013 when pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from signing the association agreement with the EU and instead accepted a trade and bailout deal with Russia. Back then, the pro-western opposition political forces, led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko – who had been prosecuted for corruption, bribery and misuse of public finances – reacted fiercely demanding the immediate resignation of the President.

The situation was an ideal opportunity for the EU and the US to interfere more actively in Ukraine’s internal affairs in order to serve their own geo-strategic interests in the region. The Euro-Atlantic intervention followed the known pattern of the so-called “Colour Revolutions” and the “Arab Spring”, covered behind supposedly “spontaneous”, but in fact very well elaborated, protests which subsequently turned violent. The center of these protests was Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s Independence Square. 

Euromaidan protests became the stage of activity for fascist and neo-Nazi groups (e.g “Right Sector”, “Ukrainian National Assembly”, “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists”, Banderites, etc) and was openly endorsed by NATO and EU member-states’ embassies. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador in Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt played a key role in supporting the Euromaidan coup on behalf of the Obama administration. The desire of the US government to have full and unchallenged control of the situation created by Euromaidan was perfectly captured in Nuland’s words during a phone conversation with Pyatt: “You know, fuck the EU”.

Fascist groups in the streets of Kyiv

On 21 February 2024, following days of violent clashes, over 100 deaths and the mediation of European governments, mainly France and Germany, Yanukovych government and the leaders of the opposition signed an agreement which, among others, promised return to the 2004 constitution, early elections and withdrawal of security forces from the center of Kyiv. The negotiation process as well as the agreement were closely witnessed by the Russian government as well. Nonetheless, things didn’t go as President Yanukovych expected. He was overthrown while he was on a planned trip to Eastern Ukraine and the new temporary coup government under Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was immediately recognized by the EU and the US.

Yanukovych found refuge in Russia and, at the same time, pro-Russian protests erupted across Ukraine, especially in the south and eastern parts of the country, including Crimea. Armed fascist and nationalist paramilitary gangs undertook the responsibility to suppress the riots by unleashing a wave of violence against the pro-Russian population. Within their terrorist activity, on 2 May 2014 Ukrainian fascists committed a horrendous crime in Odessa, burning alive more than 100 protesters in the Trade Unions House.

The Minsk agreements

Despite the orgy of violence and terrorism exercised by Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries, the Russian-speaking population in Crimea and the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk (that is the majority of the people in the Donbass region) refused to accept the new coup government formed in Kyiv. Under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population from an imminent extermination, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula and then annexed it. At the same time, following weeks of clashes with Ukrainian state and paramilitary forces, pro-Russian separatists in Donbass proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic as “independent states”.

In order to avoid any further escalation in Donbass, France, Germany and Belarus initiated a round of negotiations which led to the signing of the so-called Minsk Agreements, the first on 5 September 2014 and the second on 12 February 2015. The agreements consisted of a package of measures, including ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, release of prisoners of war and constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government – not independence though – to specific areas of Donbass.

Massacre in Odessa, 2 May 2014

The Ukrainian government failed to implement its own commitments and, on the other hand, Moscow used Russian separatists as a “trojan horse” for the promotion of its influence in the region. In fact, none of the two parties really wanted the implementation of the Minsk Agreements but, instead, they pushed their own agendas on the expense of the working people.

The failure of the Minsk Agreements was accompanied by a ferocious military assault of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and fascist paramilitaries (e.g neo-Nazi Azov battalion) against the people of Donbass. This attempted genocide, which had the silent approval of the West, namely NATO and the EU, provided to Putin administration the necessary pretext in order to launch the “Special Military Operation (SMO)” and the invasion that took place two years ago, on February 2022.

Ten years later…

Ten years since the Euromaidan events and two years after the Russian invasion, a full-scale disastrous war is being waged against the people of Ukraine and Russia. As we have stressed out in the past, It is a war that takes place between two adversary imperialist blocs, the Euro-Atlantic one (USA, NATO, EU) and the emerging Eurasian bloc led by China and Russia. The division of mineral wealth, energy, territories, labour force, pipelines, transport routes of commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares lie at the heart of the military conflict.

The reactionary government of Volodymir Zelenskiy has been used as a pawn on the chessboard of this inter-imperialist rivalry and, sooner or later, will be thrown in the dustbin of political history by its own masters.

The peoples of Russia and Ukraine, who had been living in peace and prospered together under the Soviet Union, have no interest in siding with one imperialist or another, with one alliance or another that serves the interests of the monopolies.

The interest of the working class and the popular strata in every country requires to chart their own independent path against monopolies and bourgeois classes, for the overthrow of capitalism, for the strengthening of the class struggle against imperialist war, for socialism which remains as timely and necessary as ever before.

Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism. 

An endgame in Ukraine may be fast approaching / by Paul Robinson

The military situation today is very different from that of a year ago when commentators were predicting that final victory was within Ukraine’s grasp. Photo courtesy the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade/Armed Forces of Ukraine/X.

After two years of war, an increasingly sombre mood has swept over Ukraine and its supporters in the West.

Reposted from Canadian Dimension

It is probably fair to say that nobody has done a very good job of predicting the ups and downs of the war in Ukraine, which this week marks its second anniversary. Initially, analysts overestimated the power of the Russian army, believing that it would quickly defeat Ukraine. When that turned out to be untrue, they then made the mistake of underestimating Russia, believing that Ukraine was bound to triumph. Now, the circle is turning again, and a spell of gloom is falling down over the West, as it faces the reality that Russia has not collapsed under the weight of sanctions, that the Russian army is showing no signs of disintegration, and that it is Ukraine that seems to be coming off worse in recent battles. The question we now face, therefore, is whether the current gloom is justified or is yet another misperception of reality.

The evidence would suggest that the former is possibly more likely than the latter, although we can’t be entirely certain. The military situation today is very different from that of a year ago when military commentators were confidently predicting that final victory was within Ukraine’s grasp. Huge hopes were placed in an offensive operation planned for the spring and summer of 2023. Its direction was widely known—too widely known, in fact, as it gave the Russians lots of time to prepare. The Ukrainians were to strike southwards in Zaporozhe province in order to reach the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, cutting Crimea off from Russia, and isolating it from resupply. Russia, it was believed, would then be forced to concede defeat, and Putin might even be ousted from power by disgruntled Russian elites, determined to save what they could from the debacle.

While some military analysts thought that this objective might be a bit much for Ukraine, they nonetheless expected the Ukrainians to make some notable advances. Optimism ran high. It continued even when the much-advertised offensive ran immediately into major difficulties after it began in early June. The narrative changed. Pundits now argued that capturing territory was not important. What mattered was destroying the enemy’s army, and that the Russians were supposedly suffering far greater casualties than the Ukrainians (a claim for which no strong evidence was ever produced). The calculus of attrition favoured Ukraine, went the argument. Backed by the massive economic power of the West, Ukraine could not but triumph over the much weaker Russia.

It was not to be. By the start of October, the Ukrainian army had abandoned its offensive, having advanced at most about 10 kilometres in a couple of small sectors of the front. The massive stocks of ammunition that had been piled up for the offensive had been expended. Meanwhile, the Russian army, far from losing the attritional battle, had become stronger than before. Buoyed by large numbers of new recruits, increased military industrial production, and weapons supplies from Iran and North Korea, by mid-October the Russians were attacking along the approximately 1,000 kilometre long front line. Last week their attacks finally bore major fruit in the form of the capture of one of the most strongly fortified of all Ukrainian positions, the town of Avdiivka. Further Russian advances are now widely expected.

Coming on top of the failure of the Ukrainian summer offensive, the capture of Avdiivka has reinforced an increasingly sombre mood among pro-Ukrainian politicians and commentators in the West. Talk of a Ukrainian victory has almost entirely disappeared. Even the most optimistic analysts speak only of Ukraine holding the line in 2024 and going back onto the attack in 2025. Even that, though, is dependent on the West increasing its supplies of weapons to Ukraine, as well as on the Ukrainians themselves sorting out their manpower problems. At present, though, the flow of weapons is slower than it was a year ago, while the Ukrainian army is struggling to conscript an adequate number of its citizens. Military recruiters have been recorded admitting that they have fallen far short of their conscription targets. Those that they do round up are often aged and, as even pro-Ukrainian commentators admit, “are in poor physical shape and have health issues that limit their ability to fight.” A new conscription law is currently going through the Ukrainian parliament, but even if it passes, it will take months for its effects to be felt, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed in enabling the Ukrainian state to drag more of its reluctant population into military service. American military analyst Rob Lee comments that “Ukraine faces two acute issues right now: a lack of ammunition and a lack of infantry.” That’s pretty much the definition of an army that is losing.

On the other side, Russia also has problems. Its losses are heavy, and while it has demonstrated an ability to win local tactical victories, it has yet to prove that it can convert these into broader operational success. Meanwhile, it continues to use up supplies at a faster rate than it produces them, a process that cannot last forever, as eventually stocks will become exhausted. While Russia fires many more artillery shells than Ukraine, it doesn’t fire as many as it used to. This leads some to argue that “Russia’s domestic ammunition production capabilities are currently insufficient for meeting the needs of the Ukraine conflict.”

Nevertheless, increases in Russian arms production mean that Russian industry is currently outproducing the entirety of NATO in most crucial areas, such as artillery ammunition, tanks, and drones. There is no sign as yet of any substantial reduction in Russian firepower. Although Russian artillery has indeed become somewhat less active, it remains powerful, and the reduced activity has been more than compensated for by increased use of drones and large air-launched “glide bombs,” such as the 500 and 1,500 kilogram FAB bombs, scores of which were being dropped every day on Avdiivka during the final days of the battle there. At present, Russia substantially outguns Ukraine, and even if Western aid to Ukraine were suddenly to grow, it seems unlikely that it could grow so much as to bring parity, let alone the large advantage required for a military breakthrough.

Beyond that, Russia also enjoys a significant manpower advantage. Not only is its population much bigger than Ukraine’s, but it is also proving able to recruit large numbers of volunteers. According to the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, Russia is recruiting about 30,000 volunteers a month, a figure that roughly coincides with official Russian claims of around 400,000 volunteers a year. By contrast, in the past 12 months, Ukraine has proven unable to gather even half that many recruits through conscription (volunteers for the Ukrainian army are nowadays few and far between). Western analysts have long claimed that one of Ukraine’s biggest advantages over Russia was a greater willingness to fight. If that ever was the case, it doesn’t seem to be so any more.

All this makes the prospects of a decisive Ukrainian victory seem very slim. Even if Ukraine can somehow regain the initiative, it seems very doubtful that it could ever gain the degree of military superiority that it would need to achieve its stated political objective of restoring its 1991 borders. It would be unwise to say that that is impossible, but at present it’s very hard indeed to imagine how it could be done. Furthermore, even if it could, it would take very many years, at the end of which one might wonder what would be left of Ukraine and its population.

Given this reality, talk is now increasingly shifting from how to help Ukraine win to how to help Ukraine to force Russia to abandon its more extreme political objectives (neutrality and demilitarization of Ukraine) and accept a more limited outcome. This might involve Russia keeping whatever territories it should happen to control at the time of a ceasefire, while allowing Ukraine to keep open the option of eventually joining NATO. This is a more plausible objective for Ukraine than restoring its previous borders. But it must be noted that even this would require years more fighting, so as to convince the Russian leadership that it can’t achieve anything greater and to cash in what winnings it has. Again, the price that Ukraine would have to pay for such a prolonged war would be enormous. One has to wonder if it would be worth it.

As things stand, two years into the conflict, the war’s outcome remains uncertain, although some things are becoming clearer. The chances of a decisive Ukrainian victory now seem very low. What remains less sure is whether Russia has the ability to win such a victory itself. There is little indication of a sudden breakthrough of the Ukrainian line and a return to rapid maneuver warfare. There is, though, some chance that continued pressure over the next few months may cause something somewhere to break on the Ukrainian side. But there is also a possibility that the Ukrainians will somehow cling on, and that a combination of renewed Western aid and a successful mobilization of Ukrainian manpower will then enable the Ukrainians to restore a degree of military balance, producing a long-lasting stalemate.

The next few months are of decisive importance, as they are likely to determine down which of these paths the war is headed. In the meantime, some long and bloody fighting lies ahead.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

Trump as the Terminator of All Mankind / by Alfred W. McCoy

“Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for U.S. foreign policy,” writes McCoy. What would it mean? Nothing good | Image: ArtCard

The deeply disastrous world that awaits if the former president resumes his duties.

 Reposted from Common Dreams

With recent polls giving Donald Trump a reasonable chance of defeating President Biden in the November elections, commentators have begun predicting what his second presidency might mean for domestic politics. In a dismally detailed Washington Post analysis, historian Robert Kagan argued that a second Trump term would feature his “deep thirst for vengeance” against what the ex-president has called the “radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country,” thereby launching what Kagan calls “a regime of political persecution” leading to “an irreversible descent into dictatorship.”

So far, however, Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for U.S. foreign policy. Citing his recent promise of “a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods,” the New York Times did recently conclude that a renewed trade war with China “would significantly disrupt the U.S. economy,” leading to a loss of 744,000 jobs and $1.6 trillion in gross domestic product. Economic relations with China are, however, but one piece of a far larger puzzle when it comes to future American global power, a subject on which media reporting and commentary have been surprisingly reticent.

So let me take the plunge by starting with a prediction I made in a December 2010 TomDispatch piece that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.” I added then that a “realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could be all over except for the shouting.”

I also offered a scenario hinged on — yes! — next November’s elections. “Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair,” I wrote then, “a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Back then, of course, 2025 was so far off that any prediction should have been a safe bet. After all, 15 years ago, I was already in my mid-60s, which should have given me a “get-out-of-jail-free” card — that is, a reasonable chance of dying before I could be held accountable. But with 2025 now less than a year away, I’m still here (unlike all too many of my old friends) and still responsible for that prediction.

So, let’s imagine that “a far-right patriot,” one Donald Trump, does indeed “capture the presidency with thundering rhetoric” next November. Let me then don the seven-league boots of the historical imagination and, drawing on Trump’s previous presidential record, offer some thoughts about how his second shot at an America-first foreign policy — one based on “demanding respect for American authority” — might affect this country’s global power, already distinctly on the decline.

As our Lonely Planet Guide to a country called the future, let’s take along a classic study former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in retirement in 1997. Drawing on his view that Eurasia remained the “central basis for global primacy,” he argued that Washington had to do just three things to maintain world leadership: first, preserve its position in Western Europe through the NATO alliance; second, maintain its military bases along the Pacific littoral to check China; and finally, prevent any “assertive single entity” like China or Russia from controlling the critical “middle space” of Central Asia and the Middle East. Given his past record and current statements, it seems all too likely that Trump will indeed badly damage, if not destroy, those very pillars of American global power.

Wrecking the NATO Alliance

Trump’s hostility to alliances in general and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in particular is a matter of historical record. His hostility to NATO’s crucial mutual-defense clause (Article 5) — requiring all signatories to respond if one were attacked — could prove fatal. Just days after his 2018 sycophantic summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump, “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?”

Weighing his words with uncharacteristic care, Trump replied: “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question.” He then offered what could, in a second term, prove a virtual death sentence for NATO. “Montenegro,” he said, “is a tiny country with very strong people…They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War Three.”

Since then, of course, Putin has invaded Ukraine and the Biden White House has rallied NATO to defend that frontline European state. Although Congress approved a massive $111 billion in aid (including $67 billion in military aid) for Ukraine in the war’s first 18 months, the Republican-led House has recently stalled President Biden’s request for an additional $67 billion critical to Kyiv’s continued resistance. As the campaign for his party’s nomination gathers momentum, Trump’s pro-Putin sentiments have helped persuade Republican legislators to break with our NATO allies on this critical issue.

Keep in mind that, right after Russia invaded in February 2022, Trump labeled Putin’s move “genius,” adding, “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” Last September, after Putin thanked him for claiming that, were he still president, he could end the war in 24 hours, Trump assuredMeet the Press: “I would get him into a room. I’d get Zelensky into a room. Then I’d bring them together. And I’d have a deal worked out.”

In reality, a reelected Trump would undoubtedly simply abandon Ukraine, at best forcing it into negotiations that would be tantamount to surrender. As formerly neutral nations Finland and Sweden have rallied to NATO and alliance stalwarts like Britain and Germany make major arms deliveries to Ukraine, Europe has clearly labeled Russia’s invasion and war an existential threat. Under such circumstances, a future Trump tilt toward Putin could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance, which, for the past 75 years, has served as a singular pillar in the architecture of U.S. global power.

Alienating Allies on the Pacific Littoral

Just as NATO has long served as a strategic pillar at the western end of the vast Eurasian land mass, so four bilateral alliances along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines have proven a geopolitical fulcrum for dominance over the eastern end of Eurasia and the defense of North America. Here, the record of the first Trump administration was, at best, mixed. On the credit side of history’s ledger, he did revive “the Quad,” a loose alliance with Australia, India, and Japan, which has gained greater coherence under President Biden.

But only time spared Trump’s overall Asian diplomacy from utter disaster. His obsessive personal courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, marked by two meaningless meetings and the exchange of 27 mash notes, failed to produce any sign of Pyongyang’s (nuclear) disarmament, while weakening America’s alliance with long-standing ally South Korea. Although Japan’s prime minister obsequiously paid court to Trump, he battered that classic bilateral alliance with constant complaints about its cost, even slapping a punitive 25% duty on Japanese steel imports.

Ignoring the pleas of close Asian allies, Trump also cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving the door open for China to conclude its own Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with 15 Asia-Pacific countries that now account for nearly a third of Beijing’s foreign trade. Another four years of Trump’s “America first” diplomacy in the Pacific could do irreparable damage to those key strategic alliances.

Further south, by using Taiwan to both confront and court Chinese President Xi Jinping, while letting the Philippines drift toward Beijing’s orbit and launching a misbegotten trade war with China, Trump’s version of Asian “diplomacy” allowed Beijing to make some real diplomatic, economic, and military gains, while distinctly weakening the American position in the region. Biden, by contrast, has at least partially restored it, a strengthening reflected in a surprisingly amicable San Francisco summit last November with President Xi.

In South Asia, where the bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan dominates all diplomacy, President Trump trashed a 70-year military alliance with Pakistan with a single New Year’s Day message. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years,” Trump tweeted, “and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools… No more!” Since then, Pakistan has shifted decisively into Beijing’s orbit, while India now plays Moscow and Washington off against each other to its economic advantage.

Just as Trump’s posture toward Europe could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance in a second term, so his mix of economic nationalism and strategic myopia could destabilize the array of alliances along the Pacific littoral, toppling that second of Brzezinski’s three pillars for American global power.

That “Assertive Single Entity” in Central Asia

And when it comes to that third pillar of U.S. global power –- preventing any “assertive single entity” from controlling the “middle space” of Eurasia — President Trump failed woefully (as, in fact, had his predecessors). After announcing China’s trillion-dollar Belt & Road Initiative in 2013, President Xi has spent billions building a steel grid of roads, rails, and pipelines that crisscross the middle space of that vast Eurasian landmass, an enormous new infrastructure that has led to a chain of alliances stretching across central Asia.

The power of China’s position was manifested in 2021 when Beijing helped push the U.S. military out of Afghanistan in a deft geopolitical squeeze-play. More recently, Beijing also brokered a breathtaking diplomatic entente between Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, stunning Washington and many Western diplomats.

Trump’s Middle East policy during his first term in office was focused solely on backing Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, cancelling a nuclear agreement with Iran, seconding his marginalization of the Palestinians, and promoting Arab recognition of Israel. Since the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and Netanyahu’s devastating assault on Gaza’s civilian population, President Biden’s reaction was skewed in an almost Trumpian fashion toward Israel, with a consequent loss of influence in the wider region. And count on one thing: an incoming Trump administration would only compound the damage.

In short, Beijing is already toppling the third pillar of American global power in that critical “middle space” of Eurasia. In a second Trump term, an unchecked Chinese diplomatic and economic juggernaut could arguably grind that pillar into rubble.

Africa in the “World Island”

In fact, however, no matter what Brzezinski might have thought, there are other pillars of world power beyond Eurasia — above all, Africa. Indeed, Sir Halford Mackinder, the author of the global geopolitical analysis that deeply influenced the former national security adviser, argued over a century ago that the locus of global power lay in a tri-continental combination of Europe, Asia, and Africa that he dubbed “the world island.”

In the age of high imperialism, Europe found Africa a fertile field for colonial exploitation and, during the Cold War, Washington added to that continent’s suffering by making it a superpower surrogate battleground. But Beijing grasped the human potential of Africa and, in the 1970s, began building lasting economic alliances with its emerging nations. By 2015, its trade with Africa had climbed to $222 billion, three times America’s. Its investments there were then projected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025.

Recognizing the strategic threat, President Barack Obama convened a 2014 summit with 51 African leaders at the White House. Trump, however, dismissed the entire continent, during a 2018 Oval Office meeting, as so many “shithole countries.” The Trump administration tried to repair the damage by sending First Lady Melania off on a solo trip to Africa, but her bizarre colonial outfits and ill-timed administration cuts in foreign aid to the continent only added to the damage.

In addition to a storehouse of natural resources, Africa’s chief asset is its growing pool of human talent. Africa’s median age is 19 (compared to 38 for both China and the U.S.), meaning that, by 2050, that continent will be home to a full one-third of the world’s young. Given his fraught record with the region, Trump’s second term would likely do little more than hand the whole continent to China on a gold-plated platter.

South of the Border

Even in Latin America, the situation has been changing in a complex fashion. As a region informally incorporated into the American imperium for more than a century and suffering all the slights of an asymmetric alliance, its increasingly nationalist leaders welcomed China’s interest in this century. By 2017, in fact, Chinese trade with Latin America had hit a substantial $244 billion, making it — yes! — the region’s largest trading partner. Simultaneously, Beijing’s loans to Caribbean countries had reached a hefty $62 billion by the end of the Trump administration.

Except for drug interdiction and economic sanctions against leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, the Trump White House generally ignored Latin America, doing nothing to slow China’s commercial juggernaut. Although the Biden administration made some diplomatic gestures toward the region, China’s trade rose relentlessly to $450 billion by 2022.

Reflecting a bipartisan indifference in this century, a reelected President Trump would likely do little to check China’s growing commercial hegemony over Latin America. And the region would undoubtedly welcome such indifference, since the alternative — along with draconian moves at the U.S.-Mexican border — might involve plans to fire missiles at or send troops to knock out drug labs in Mexico. The backlash to such unilateral intervention amid panic over immigration could cripple U.S. relations with the region for decades to come.

Fading American Hegemony

In the world that a second Trump term might face in 2025, American global power will probably be far less imposing than it was when he came into office in 2016. The problem won’t be that this time around he’s already appointing advisers determined to let Trump be Trump or, as the New York Timesput it recently, who are “forging plans for an even more extreme agenda than his first term.” By every significant metric — economic, diplomatic, and even military — U.S. power has been on a downward slide for at least a decade. In the more unipolar world of 2016, Trump’s impulsive, individualized version of diplomacy was often deeply damaging, but on at least a small number of occasions modestly successful. In the more multipolar world he would have to manage nearly a decade later, his version of a unilateral approach could prove deeply disastrous.

After taking his second oath of office in January of 2025, President Trump’s “thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal,” might indeed fulfill the prediction I made some 15 years ago: “The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the author of “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power”. Previous books include: “Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation” (University of Wisconsin, 2012), “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project)”, “Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State”, and “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade”.

Putin Lifts the fog of War in Ukraine / by M.K. Bhadrakumar

Vladimir Putin. Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Reposted from NewsClick

Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine is entering a new phase. President Vladimir Putin lifted the fog of war and hinted at what can be expected going forward in a landmark speech at the National Defence Control Centre while addressing a meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board on December 19.  

Russia has gained the upper hand in the proxy war while the United States is struggling to recreate a new narrative. For Putin, this is a moment of triumph where he has no reason to take advantage of the fog of war in Ukraine, whereas, for President Joe Biden, the fog of war continues to serve a useful purpose of dissimulation in the crucial election ahead where he seeks a second term. 

Putin’s speech exuded a buoyant mood. The Russian economy has not only regained its pre-2022 momentum but is accelerating toward a 3.5% growth rate by the yearend, marked by rising incomes and purchasing power for millions of its citizens and an increase in living standards. Unemployment is at an all-time low and Russia has beaten back the Western sanctions and the attempts to isolate it in the international arena. 

The leitmotif of Putin’s speech is that this is a war that Russia never sought but was imposed on it by the US. Putin had listed last year in February five clear-cut objectives of the Russian military operation — security of the Russian population; de-Nazification of Ukraine; demilitarisation of Ukraine; striving for a friendly regime in Kiev; and, non-admission of Ukraine into NATO. These are of course interlocked objectives. The US and its allies know it but continue to pretend otherwise with their focus in the proxy war has been a military victory and regime change in Russia. 

Putin’s message is that any new Western narrative on the war is doomed to meet with the same fate as the previous one unless there is realism that Russia cannot be militarily defeated and its legitimate interests are recognised. 

The heart of the matter is that the West all along perceived Ukraine as a geopolitical project targeting Russia. Today, even with defeat staring at its face, the West’s priority lies in forcing Russia to agree to a ceasefire on the basis of the existing line of contact without any geopolitical or strategic obligations on the part of Washington or the transatlantic alliance — which, de facto, would mean leaving the door for the rearmament of the battered Ukrainian military and for Kiev’s accession to NATO through the back door. 

Suffice to say, the discredited agenda of using Ukraine as a pawn to pursue the West’s anti-Russian policy is still very much around. But Moscow will not fall for the US’ trap a second time, risking another war that may erupt at a time that suits NATO. 

Unsurprisingly, Putin’s speech paid great attention to revving up Russia’s defence industry to meet any military exigencies that might arise. But towards the end of his speech, Putin also dwelt on Russia’s politico-military options under the circumstances. 

On the military side, clearly, Russia will press forward the attritional war to its logical end of pushing the Ukrainian military into a strategic dead-end, which would mean seeking tactical improvements along the frontline, undermining Ukraine’s economic potential, inflicting military losses, and boosting Russia’s own defence industry on a scale that tips the balance of forces to weigh against any military adventures by the NATO.  

In the final analysis, Putin asserted, Russia is determined to reclaim the “vast historical territories, Russian territories, along with the population” that the Bolsheviks transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet era. However, he drew an important distinction as regards the “western lands” of Ukraine (west of Dnieper) that are a legacy of World War II over which there could be territorial claims from Poland, Hungary and Romania, which at least in the case of Poland is also linked to the transfer of “eastern German lands, the Danzig Corridor, and Danzig itself” following the defeat of the Third Reich. 

Putin took note that “people who live there (western Ukraine) – many of them, at least, I know this for sure, 100 percent – they want to return to their historical homeland. The countries that lost these territories, primarily Poland, dream of having them back.” 

That said, interestingly, Putin simply washed his hands off any territorial disputes that may arise between Ukraine and its eastern neighbours (all of whom are NATO countries.) Looking ahead, this is going to be a can of worms for the US. Recently, Russia’s intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin used a powerful metaphor, warning that the US may face a “second Vietnam” in Ukraine that will come to haunt it for a long time. 

The bottom line, as Putin framed it, is as follows: “History will put everything in its place. We (Moscow) will not interfere, but we will not give up what is ours. Everyone should be aware of this –- those in Ukraine who are aggressively disposed towards Russia, and in Europe, and in the United States. If they want to negotiate, let them do so. But we will do it only based on our interests.”

Putin concluded saying that if the final arbiter is military prowess, that explains why Russia is focusing on a “strong, reliable, well-equipped, and properly motivated Armed Forces” backed by a strong economy and “the support of the multi-ethnic people of Russia.” 

There is a strong likelihood of Russian military operations moving further westward toward the Dnieper in the coming months, well beyond the four new territories that joined the Russian Federation last year — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhia, and Kherson. In the absence of any negotiated settlement, Russia may choose to unilaterally “liberate” those southern regions of Ukraine that were historically part of Russia, which would presumably include Odessa and the entire Black Sea coast, or Kharkov to the north of the Donbass region. 

Russia is expecting that the combat capabilities of the Ukrainian forces will sharply diminish in the near future and the army faces difficulty already to get new recruits. That is to say, through the year ahead, the balance of forces at the front will shift due to the Ukrainian military’s heavy losses and the drop in Western aid, and, at some point, Ukraine’s defences will begin to crumble.     

Russia’s recent gains in military operations — eg., Soledar, Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), Avdeevka, Maryinka, etc. — already testify to a shift in the balance of forces between the two armies. This shift will further accelerate as Russia’s military-industrial complex is functioning optimally and Russia is massively deploying new types of weapons, such as gliding aviation bombs, which have altered the role of the Russian Air Force in the conflict. 

Dozens of heavy aerial bombs are dropped every single day and similarly, there is increase in the use of modern barrage ammunition and some other systems, including precision-guided munitions. T-90M tanks and new types of light armoured vehicles have also appeared on the battlefield. 

In comparison, Ukraine faces a decrease in arms supplies due to limited production capacities in the West where sustainable production growth on an industrial scale is not attainable in the near term. Meanwhile, the Middle East (West Asia) crisis and the tensions around Taiwan become major distractions for the US. 

All these factors taken into account, a decisive shift in the balance of forces against Ukraine is entirely conceivable by the end of next year, leading to an end of the conflict on Russia’s terms.

Courtesy: Indian Punchline

M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey.

Biden policy on Ukraine war a bust on several fronts / by John Wojcik

A woman cries in front of a building which was destroyed by a Russian attack in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, Dec. 16, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe, but nearly two years after the Russian invasion, it’s not clear that U.S. military support for Kiev has achieved any of its major goals. | Evgeniy Maloletka / AP

Reposted from the People’s World

Very few, if any, of the lofty goals laid out by the Biden administration when it began to pour billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine after the Russian invasion have been met.

The sophisticated U.S. arms the public was told would enable Ukraine to win the war have led not to victory but instead to what we see today: Ukrainians being sent on suicide missions in an attempt to shore up their failing counteroffensive. Death tolls of both Ukrainians and Russians are in the hundreds of thousands.

Here at home, the progressive aspects of Biden’s domestic agenda are in danger as the tens of billions of dollars spent on the war in Ukraine and the rest of the trillion-dollar military budget drain funds badly needed in U.S. communities.

Although there are still plenty of deadly weapons that are slated for Ukraine until at least next June, the public, both in the U.S. and European countries, is hearing stories about rampant corruption in Ukraine and asking how the aid is being spent.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not help matters when he recently told U.S. reporters that he could not reveal what his country would do with the additional $60 billion now requested by Biden. Republicans have walked right into the door he and Biden left open to demand “accountability,” and they are holding up the U.S. aid just as the counteroffensive has been declared almost dead.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the exhibition ‘Development of the Creative Economy in Russia’ in Moscow last May. Though international companies will be reluctant to invest in Russia even after the war, for now, the economy is not collapsing as U.S. policymakers envisioned when they applied sanctions. | Vladimir Astapkovich / Sputnik via AP

They are also demanding draconian right-wing changes to U.S. policy on the border with Mexico in exchange for approving any additional military aid to Ukraine—some of which Biden has signaled he may be open to.

Dead Ukrainians, dead Russians, fracking from one end of America to the other, and higher profits than ever for the fossil fuel companies and arms makers are the results of U.S. military aid to Ukraine so far.

The stalemate on the eastern front in Ukraine is actually a horror story worse than anyone would have imagined almost two years ago when the Russians first invaded. Ukrainian troops report that they are being sent on “suicide” missions in Kherson, for example, as their commanders dispatch them in a futile effort to establish a bridgehead on the Russian-controlled side of the Dnieper River.

Without using their names, they tell reporters that dead Ukrainians have been lying for months in the mud along the shores of the river and say the government is lying about the “progress” that is not being made.

“We spend all night in the water, and in the day time we watch as our comrades are killed all around us,” one soldier told the New York Times this week. “Yet the government says we are making progress. It is not true.” The soldiers told reporters they are under constant shelling, something not mentioned by a Ukrainian government desperate to show victories where there are none in order to qualify for more American “aid.”

Aside from assuring a military victory for Ukraine, Americans were told that another result of the shipping U.S. military hardware to Kiev would be the preservation of Ukraine as a “democracy,” standing against Russia, the “imperialist autocracy.”

Setting aside for a moment the descriptions of Putin that all Americans have heard, it pays to also examine what is going on in Ukraine when it comes to the question of democracy.

For the most part, major media in the U.S. have minimized things like the banning of most political parties in Ukraine, the shutdown of all newspapers except one government publication, the establishment of only one state-controlled television news station, the banning of the Russian language spoken by 35% of the population, cancellation of the coming elections, the murder of the former head of the country’s socialist party, and the disappearing of leaders of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Sometimes the attacks on democracy in Ukraine are so severe, however, that even the New York Times can’t ignore them. This week, that publication reported how soldiers are snatching people off the streets all over the country, forcing them into conscription.

People with both physical and mental disabilities, certified as draft exempt, are being forced into cars by army recruiters and driven to places where they are beaten and otherwise abused until they agree to join the army. Disabled people have also been shipped to the front lines, where some have died.

Hundreds of families are in court trying to stop the attacks by army recruiters, but lawyers and activists say the government defends the actions, using the excuse that the country is under martial law.

Many of the out-of-control conscription operations were actually set up with Zelensky’s approval after he recently fired many older recruiters who were not getting satisfactory results. Some were also accepting or demanding huge bribes in the thousands of dollars to grant those with cash an exemption from military service.

In the beginning of the war, there were more volunteers, but increasingly the Ukrainian public is growing tired of war and deprivation and want nothing more than peace. Anti-war demonstrations are illegal in Ukraine, however, just as they are in Russia. Even calling for negotiations to end the war can lead to arrest and jailing as a “traitor” in Ukraine.

The Biden policy to improve democracy’s chances in the region involves U.S. collaboration with the exact opposite of pro-democracy forces, among them right-wing nationalist and even fascist elements in several countries. In particular, Latvia and the other Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia, are run by extreme nationalist anti-Russian right wingers.

In Latvia, as much as 40% of the country is Russian-speaking, with tens of thousands of those people having been born in Latvia more than 40 and 50 years ago when the country was part of the Soviet Union. The right-wing nationalist government in Latvia has been sending out notices to thousands of these people that they must evacuate the country by the end of this year.

Stripped of their citizenship, pensions, and rights, they are being left with nowhere to go. There are bans on history books that tell about Nazi concentration camps set up in Latvia and laws that require Russian speakers to speak Latvian instead.

Just as the U.S. was aligned with Ukraine as it persecuted Russian speakers in Ukraine for so many years, it is now similarly aligned with Baltic countries doing the same thing. The entire situation is particularly tragic when one considers that during the days of the Soviet Union and socialism, Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians worked together to successfully defeat the Nazis who occupied all their countries.

The other—and perhaps the most important—result of Biden administration policy in Ukraine was supposed to be the use of that war to defeat and permanently weaken Russia without the U.S. military ever having to get directly involved in the war.

That projected result has also more than failed, with Russia today actually displaying what the New York Times called recently a “robust consumer economy.”

When the Russians first invaded Ukraine, Zelensky urged all Western companies to vacate Russia. “Don’t let them see a penny of your business,” he said, and many began moving out. In addition, the U.S. imposed what it said would be “crippling” sanctions, with Biden even bragging that the exodus of U.S. companies would destroy the Russian economy.

Nothing of the kind happened, though, because what U.S. businessmen did not count on was a fightback from the Russian side. Large companies were nationalized by the Russian government, and smaller ones were forced to sell at low prices to people connected to Putin and his ruling circle. This forced many who wanted to leave to rethink their decision; several opted to maintain their operations in Russia.

If a company wanted to leave, the Russian government imposed heavy capital flight taxes—something the U.S. government should emulate, by the way, to keep big companies from fleeing overseas for cheaper labor. The companies that pursued leaving Russia lost well over $100 billion in profits, according to estimates in the Times.

Companies that wanted to leave were also forced to compensate their workers for wages lost, making Putin and the government popular in the eyes of the many thousands of people employed by these companies.

Huge companies like Toyota, Ikea, and others were taken over by the state. Consumers often ended up getting better prices from the state-owned versions of Toyota and Ikea than they did when they were privately owned.

Russian singer and entrepreneur Timur Yunusov, better known as Timati, drinks coffee at a newly opened Stars Coffee coffee shop in the former location of the Starbucks coffee shop in Moscow. Yunusov, together with Russian restaurateur Anton Pinskiy, bought the Starbucks stores following the company’s withdrawal from Russia. | Dmitry Serebryakov / AP

The Krispy Kreme doughnut chain became Krunchy Dream; Starbucks stores were rebranded Stars Coffee. Pepsi, supposedly pulled from the Russian market, still sits on supermarket shelves, as the popular drink is now imported from Kazakhstan. Muscovites who prefer Coca-Cola also don’t have to worry, as there are regular supplies arriving from Poland.

Again, workers in all these companies kept their jobs and were not particularly unhappy about getting paid more than they did before. Putin, of course, used all of these developments to deflect attacks on him as a killer and an autocrat. People falling out of windows or being poisoned were not the first concern for citizens who see Putin as saving their jobs and standing up to their old corporate bosses and the “West.”

It’s true that the nationalizations and forced sales have made international companies much more reluctant about ever investing in Russia again, but regardless of all that, the U.S. sanctions touted by Biden have, at least for now, largely failed and even backfired.

Here at home, we have to worry about what, for us, may end up as the biggest failure of the U.S. war policy in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world. If the Biden administration does not change course and move convincingly in the direction of peace, it jeopardizes not only its progressive domestic policies but also risks opening the door for a victory by the Republicans in 2024.

A MAGA victory, with or without Trump, would be a disaster for everyone.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

Hundreds rally in Bath & Brunswick (Maine) for Palestine / by Bruce K. Gagnon

Palestinian Solidarity March at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023 | Photo credit: Organizing Notes

Reposted from Organizing Notes

Bath Iron Works (BIW) is owned by the General Dynamics Corporation which builds the bunker buster bombs that Washington has sent to Israel. More than 100 have been shipped so far.

BIW built destroyer warships have been sent to the Red Sea (just off Yemen) and to the Mediterranean Sea to protect Israel since this war began on October 7. 

In 2003 when George W. Bush launched ‘shock and awe’ on Iraq the very first weapon fired was a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from the USS Cowpens which was built at BIW. 

In 2008 the USS Lake Erie (also built at BIW) launched an interceptor missile into space to knock out a US military satellite in what was coined ‘Operation Burnt Frost’. The warship’s interceptor proved that navy destroyers could be utilized as Anti-satellite weapons (ASATS). The Pentagon reported that the successful impact created 174 pieces of space debris.

The navy is currently encircling China and Russia with these destroyers that have shown the capability to fire first-strike attack Tomahawk cruise missiles and the ‘missile defense’ interceptors thus giving the Pentagon the ‘sword and shield’ capability in warfare.

Calling for a ceasefire, about 300 mostly young activists at Bath Iron Works on Friday | Photo credit: Organizing Notes

The protest at BIW on Friday, organized by young activists who are leading Palestinian solidarity efforts across the nation, linked the issues of Israel-US genocide of Palestine and broader American war-making efforts on behalf of collapsing empire.

No one was arrested at BIW on Friday but the road die-in did shut down traffic and forced the Bath police to reroute worker shift change vehicles causing a major congestion problem. Otherwise there were no incidents at the shipyard. The Bath police showed unusually remarkable patience and professionalism in how they handled the protest. 

Activists came early to the shipyard and handed out flyers on Friday morning and at lunch time ensuring that the workers understood that the protest was not aimed at them. Rather it was directed at the war-mongering Biden administration, Congress, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex.

The  1.5 mile march stopped at the home of US Senator Angus King (Independent from Maine) who has repeatedly refused to call for a ceasefire. King lives just a few blocks from the college. At King’s home a letter signed by 1,500 Maine college students was read to the marchers and nine long paper scrolls with names of the known dead in Gaza from Israeli bombing were delivered to King’s doorstep. He was conveniently not at home.

In Sen. King’s front yard was a Ukraine flag signaling King’s long time hatred for Russia. He once had a statewide phone call-in show on Maine Public Radio and I dialed-in to counter his trashing of Russia. He was talking about the melting ice in the Arctic Ocean and the need for the US-NATO to contest Russia for control of that region. After I made my statement to King he said, “If you like Russia so much, why don’t you move there!?”

Because of climate change the Arctic ice is melting and western resource extraction corporations want to wrest control of the region from Russia which has the largest border with the Arctic. Thus the war on Russia, using Ukraine as the hammer, has always been about grabbing Russia’s vast resource base.

So in the last three days I have been to five protests between nearby Bath and my hometown of Brunswick (about 10 miles apart). It has been very exciting to see so many young people connecting the issue dots and leading the organizing.

On we go.

Bruce K. Gagnon is co-founder and coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, he fights the reach of corporate greed into space, which pits him against most Washington officials. He has worked on space issues for more than 20 years. He speaks internationally on this high stakes topic and has written for publications such as Earth Island Journal, CounterPunch, Z Magazine, Space News, National Catholic Reporter, Asia Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Canadian Dimension. He has produced two videos, Arsenal of Hypocrisy (2003) and Battle for America’s Soul (2005) and he published a book, Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire (2005). He is host of “This Issue”, a cable TV program that airs in five communities in Maine, his home state. In 2003, Dr. Helen Caldicott named Gagnon a senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, where he also serves on her advisory board.

U.S. repeatedly blocked Ukraine peace deals; is it rethinking its strategy yet? / by John Wojcik and C.J. Atkins

They had a deal: Russian and Ukrainian negotiators agreed on a basic plan to end the war in its early days, premised on Ukrainian military neutrality and the country not joining NATO. Russia would have withdrawn all its forces. Here, the two sides meet in Brest, near Belarus, in March 2022. Shaking hands are Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podoliak and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin. Second from the left is Davyd Arakhamia, leader of Zelensky’s Servant of the People Party in the Ukrainian parliament. | Maxim Guchek / Pool photo via AP

Reposted from the People’s World

Are the U.S. and its NATO allies beginning to rethink their strategy for the war in Ukraine?

Officially, the U.S. continues to stand lockstep behind President Volodymyr Zelensky, with President Joe Biden pushing for over $60 billion in new weaponry and other aid for Ukraine as part of his recent $105 billion war budget request that included Israel and Taiwan.

Other signs, however, suggest U.S. policy regarding the war may actually be in deep trouble.

The head of Zelensky’s faction in the Ukrainian parliament, Davyd Arakhamia (a.k.a. David Braun), is openly expressing worries that Kiev’s Washington benefactor is losing interest. Stepping up his anti-Semitic rhetoric, Arakhamia says Ukraine’s dependency on the U.S. and a lack of strategy are impediments to resolving his country’s conflict with Russia.

A few days ago, Arakhamia gave an interview on Ukrainian television that grabbed international attention. He leads Zelensky’s Servant of the People Party parliamentary faction, which has eliminated most other parties in the legislature, with the exception of the extreme right-wing ones. He occupies a top spot in the president’s inner circle.

In the interview, Arakhamia accused the Biden administration of turning away from Ukraine because of “the Jews” and “the Jewish lobby” in the U.S. He said American Jews are “widely represented on all levels and in all decision-making centers” and that they are exerting pressure to downgrade Ukraine’s fight against Vladimir Putin so as to prioritize U.S. backing for Netanyahu’s war in Gaza.

Arakhamia is apparently unclear about whether the alleged international Jewish conspiracy is headquartered in Tel Aviv or Washington, D.C.

Setting aside the issue of the anti-Semitism reflected in the remarks by Zelensky’s top parliamentary operative, comments from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in recent days suggest that U.S. confidence in Kiev is indeed waning, though not because of any Israeli or Jewish distractions.

Signaling in both directions

“It is for Ukraine to decide what are acceptable ways to end this war,” Stoltenberg said Monday, a short time after Arakhamia’s interview aired. “Our responsibility is to support Ukraine and…put them in the best possible place when or if negotiations may start.”

It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to detect a change of rhetoric. No more discussions about successful counteroffensives or fighting valiantly until every inch of land is retaken from Russian forces.

Signaling left, signaling right: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg suggested this week that it’s up to Ukraine to negotiate an end to its war with Russia, but also declared that all the allies still want Kiev to join the U.S. led alliance. | Photo: AP / Design: PW

“War is by nature unpredictable,” the NATO chief continued, “the more military support we provide to Ukraine, the stronger their position will be on the battlefield and the stronger their position will be on a potential negotiating table.”

To assure Zelensky that NATO isn’t totally hanging him out to dry, however, Stoltenberg promised that all the allies still want Ukraine to become a member. Someday. After some unspecified “reforms.” Gaining membership during the war, though, remains “impossible.”

Essentially, Stoltenberg was flashing both turn signals, clearly hinting at a downgrade of expectations for an outright Ukrainian military victory but still saying just the right thing to provoke Russia and ensure that the fighting will continue.

In Stoltenberg’s words, there is a glimpse into the current thinking among the NATO leadership. It’s a revelation that exposes a major flaw in Arakhamia’s analysis of the war and his conclusion that “Jews” are stealing Biden’s attention away from Ukraine: Unlike Stoltenberg, he fails to give any importance whatsoever to how the war has actually been going on the ground in eastern Ukraine.

NATO and the U.S. have been aware for some time that the war in Ukraine wasn’t really about “beating” Russia on the battlefield anymore if it ever really was. This was evident even before the current Israeli war against Palestine began. Instead of looking for a way out, though, they repeatedly propped up their now apparently ill-fated campaign with just enough weapons infusions to keep Ukraine afloat.

Peace was possible

The bankruptcy of U.S. and allied policy in the war is reflected first of all in the failure of Ukraine’s much-hyped “summer counteroffensive,” which cost thousands of lives and only gained a few miles of muddy fields. Those pitiful “gains” cost U.S. taxpayers many billions of dollars.

The resultant destruction and loss of many more thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives continue, however, to provide the benefit of an unending profit stream flowing into the coffers of U.S. armaments makers, who enthusiastically fund lawmakers who back the war.

What is becoming all too apparent is that this conflict didn’t have to still be going on right now; it didn’t have to stretch into the bloody war of attrition that it has turned into. The killing could have ended long ago.

Though Arakhamia’s anti-Semitism has him looking in the wrong direction for explanations as to why Ukraine is losing, he does offer insights that are useful for understanding why the battles in the east are still raging.

It is clear that the U.S. and its allies were out to sabotage possibilities for peace immediately after the Russian invasion. Were it not for their interference, the current war could have ended in early March 2022—about a week after it started. Thanks to Arakhamia, we now have confirmation of this fact.

He was at the talks in Belarus and said the Russians would halt the invasion and leave Ukraine if there was agreement on Ukrainian military neutrality and its leaders gave up on NATO membership.

Rather than report this to the public, however, the media in Europe and the U.S. focused on sensational statements that were not actually part of those negotiations. They insisted that the Russians made official demands in the talks to “de-Nazify” a country that the Allies said had no Nazis. Further, Russia supposedly demanded direct control of not only the eastern Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine but also other vast stretches of the country.

Madeleine Albright, the now-deceased and famous U.S. diplomat, once said that during negotiations, one must distinguish between what participants really want and what is just political theater. In Belarus in March 2022, the U.S. chose to focus on political theater, diverting attention from the two key Russian demands.

Arakhamia said that internationally-mediated negotiations in Istanbul, shortly after the March 2022 talks in Belarus, actually produced an agreement between Ukraine and Russia to bring the fighting to an end—on the basis of those same points.

“[The Russians] were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we were ready to make a commitment that we would not join NATO. When we returned from Istanbul, [then-British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said: ‘Do not sign anything with them at all; just go to war,’” Arakhamia said.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was also in Istanbul, confirmed that a Russia-Ukraine peace deal was nearly reached in the spring of 2022. His remarks were reported in an interview with Berliner Zeitung on Oct. 21

According to Schroeder, the deal would have included four main points: The first was that Ukraine would abandon plans to join NATO. The second was that bans on the Russian language in Ukraine would be removed. The third was that Donbass would remain in Ukraine but function as an autonomous region. The fourth was that the U.N. and Germany would offer to supervise the security agreements. The Crimea situation was left to be addressed in the future.

Relatives, friends, and soldiers pay their last respects to Spartak Yarkin, 47, a Ukrainian who was killed in a fierce battle with Russian troops near Kiev in the early days of the war. His remains were only recently identified, and a funeral was held on Oct. 5, 2023. Many more Ukrainians and Russians continue to die in the war. | Efrem Lukatsky / AP

Lost opportunities

Arakhamia’s revelations about the talks in Belarus and Turkey show there have been several possible and realistic chances to end the war in Ukraine. But publicly, the U.S. and NATO still refuse to accept the fact that they bear any responsibility for time and again stonewalling and trashing negotiations that could have yielded peace.

Had the U.S. and NATO not sabotaged peace, the war might have ended, and Ukraine would also have kept all the territories like Lugansk and Donetsk that Russian forces have taken since then. Thousands of lives could have been saved.

The U.S. also would have avoided the very damaging proxy war defeat that some observers believe is becoming more imminent. But rather than seeking to negotiate a peace now, NATO leader Stoltenberg’s remarks betray a willingness to let the whole affair drag on for months or even years to come. Indeed, by continuing to hold out the possibility of Ukrainian membership in NATO, he is angling to sink any possibility of successful Russian-Ukrainian negotiations.

We have to wonder as well, what role does Biden’s re-election effort play in the matter? Is the sacrifice of thousands more Ukrainian and Russian lives seen by the White House as part of the price to pay in order to defeat the MAGA extremists? Surely Democratic strategists can come up with a way to win against Trump that doesn’t require further expenditure of human life in Eastern Europe.

Had the peace deals that were already on the table not been sabotaged, everyone would have been better off economically as well, except, of course, for the armaments makers. Ukraine would not be a devastated leftover of its former, already very poor self, and its economy wouldn’t be on life support from U.S. taxpayers. Germans and others in Europe would not be freezing for yet another winter due to the high energy prices caused by this war.

The Biden administration should be pushing for a ceasefire and talks, not calling for tens of billions of dollars more for additional weapons to be sent to Ukraine to prolong the war—a war that is really about weakening Russia so that U.S. imperialism can ultimately focus its attention on China.

It’s not too late to end the madness with that first important step, a ceasefire now. The war profiteers must be told they have already done enough damage. As in Gaza, the time for the peace forces to demand a ceasefire in Ukraine is now. The time for negotiations to end this war is now.

As with all op-ed and news-analytical articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its authors.

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John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.

Weekend of peace/space activity during Common Ground Fair / by Bruce K. Gagnon

Anti-War Demonstrators, Common Ground Fair, Unity, Maine, Septer 23, 2023

Reposted from Organizing Notes

On Saturday we had another of our monthly statewide protests calling for an end to US-UK-NATO war on Russia using Ukraine as the unfortunate proxy cannon fodder supplier.

We selected an intersection in rural Unity, Maine that was 3.5 miles from the entrance to the annual and very popular Common Ground Country Fair. We knew the traffic jam at this particular corner would be massive and it was bumper-to-bumper for the two hours that we were there.

Cars from Vermont, New York, Massachusetts and several other states were noted as they inched along. 

Thanks to the excellent work of our vigilers we received a good response from the mostly patient drivers and passengers. Since the beginning of the war in February 2022 I’d venture we have routinely been getting about a 20-25% positive response at these regular events across the state. 

On Saturday I’d say we were witnessing a 30-35%  positive response. So things are moving in the right direction. One must also keep in mind that the captive audience at that intersection were largely liberals who are the most frequent visitors to the environmentally correct fair. Considering that a high percentage were Democrats, whose leader Joe Biden is primarily responsible for provoking this war, this growing upward trend is a good sign.

The Space-War Connection

Early Sunday morning Mary Beth, our friend Leann and I drove to the fair as we had to be there prior to a 9:00 am talk about Maine’s new law allowing the creation of a rocket launch site near Steuben, Maine which is located near one of America’s most popular national parks called Acadia.  

The fair opened at 9am and the 50 minute presentation by Lisa Savage and I was scheduled at the same time – the first of the day in the Social & Political Action tent. So we only got 11 people but much to our surprise the CEO of  bluShift Aerospace, Sascha Deri, showed up. It’s interesting to know we are being watched.

Unity, Maine 09.23.23 | Photo credit: Lisa Savage

Deri’s company will be allowed to launch up to 34 rockets per year at the new site that the state authorized in an ’emergency’ bill that was passed under the gavel without a recorded vote in the Maine legislature. The so-called ‘public hearing’ was virtually done in secret, and no one spoke out against the proposal. That is because folks like us didn’t hear about the hearing’ until the last minute. (This is usually the way ‘democracy’ works on potentially controversial issues. No environmental impact statement was required either.) 

During the hearing Deri and others promised that the launches would be environmentally benign, safe, relatively quiet, and civilian – denying claims that this was all a front for the military industrial complex which is rushing forward with launch sites all over the world. 

Deri tried to interrupt Lisa and I when we led off with 10-minute talks before going to Q & A. During our two presentations we did an overview showing how the Maine launch facility was sold as one more big fat lie. Whether it is a rocket launch facility in Kodiak Island, Alaska, or at Rocket Lab in New Zealand the same false promises prove that in every case these sites now only launch Pentagon rockets and aerospace giants like Lockheed Martin are running the show.

No Toxic Rockets for ME! / Common Ground Fair | photo credit: Lisa Savage

In my short talk I told the story how just last week I was on a Zoom call from the UK where activists are now fighting against three potential rocket launch facilities in Scotland and England. And Lockheed Martin is in the middle of the stew making the same old tired promises of lots of jobs, no enviro impact, and of course all civilian.

I asked Deri where he was receiving funding for his planned 34 ‘civilian’ satellite launches per year. He acknowledged that NASA and the Space Force were funding his operation. He went on to say that the Pentagon wants more ‘mini sats’ launched in order to fill up the increasingly scarce parking spaces in Lower Earth orbit (LEO) before Russia and China can get their satellites into that high ground. Bingo!

Deri has been inviting the citizens of Maine (and beyond) to make donations to help get his ‘enviro friendly civilian launch company’ off the ground. But obviously he has found that NASA and Space Force are much more lucrative ‘supporters’.

The bill to have Maine become players in the new ‘space rush’ game was sponsored by my state senator from Brunswick – a Democrat. The Dems control the Maine legislature. Just goes to prove that the US quest to be the ‘Master of Space’ is indeed a bi-partisan project. 

On our Maine-based website NO TOXIC ROCKETS FOR ME scroll down near the bottom of the home page and see a couple videos about Kodiak Island, Rocket Lab in New Zealand and Hawaii’s so far successful effort to kill a similar rocket launch construction site by their state. 

The goal of the Space Force is to ‘control and dominate’ space in order to use the high ground to win all wars for corporate capitalism down on Mother Earth. As we approach the Global Network’s annual Keep Space for Peace Week it is crucial that we increasingly make the links between military space and earth-bound wars – full spectrum dominance.

Bruce K. Gagnon is co-founder and coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, he fights the reach of corporate greed into space, which pits him against most Washington officials. He has worked on space issues for more than 20 years. He speaks internationally on this high stakes topic and has written for publications such as Earth Island Journal, CounterPunch, Z Magazine, Space News, National Catholic Reporter, Asia Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Canadian Dimension. He has produced two videos, Arsenal of Hypocrisy (2003) and Battle for America’s Soul (2005) and he published a book, Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire (2005). He is host of “This Issue”, a cable TV program that airs in five communities in Maine, his home state. In 2003, Dr. Helen Caldicott named Gagnon a senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, where he also serves on her advisory board.