The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Turns case – Russian aggression is only due to the threat of Western and NATO imperialism
Download 2.09 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- NATO Link Ext. Cards
Turns case – Russian aggression is only due to the threat of Western and NATO imperialismEuronews 22 [euronews, 6-30-2022, "Putin blasts NATO 'imperialism' over Western military shake-up plan," https://www.euronews.com/2022/06/30/vladimir-putin-blasts-nato-imperialism-over-western-military-shake-up-plan, SMarx, JTong] NATO's promise of continued support for Ukraine in the face of Russia's "cruelty" has brought an angry response from Vladimir Putin, who denounced the alliance's "imperialist ambitions". At their summit in Madrid, members of the Western military alliance pledged to back Ukraine for as long as necessary, modernising the country's army to help it resist Russia’s invasion. NATO also updated its strategic plan to name Russia as the biggest "direct threat" to Western security. The alliance has also approved membership applications from Finland and Sweden and announced a massive boost in troop numbers along its eastern flank. But speaking during a visit to Turkmenistan, the Russian president blasted the West's attitude. "The leading countries of NATO want (...) to assert their hegemony, their imperial ambitions," he said. "The call for Ukraine to continue fighting and refuse negotiations only confirms our assumption that Ukraine and the good of the Ukrainian people is not the goal of the West and NATO, but a means to defend their own interests," the Russian leader added. NATO Link Ext. CardsNATO is responsible for the current Russian-Ukrainian War – Continued support for NATO and silencing of critics will create endless Russian WarMARCETIC ’22 -- a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden(BRANKO , “The Orwellian Attacks on Critics of NATO Policy Must Stop”, https://jacobin.com/2022/03/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-nato-expansion-criticism There’s Jack Matlock, who served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush after a decades-long career as one of the top Soviet experts in the US Foreign Service. He wrote in the lead-up to this war that “there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War,” and that “the policies pursued by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all contributed to bringing us to this point.” Matlock had called for a diplomatic solution to prevent war, principally around Moscow’s negotiation demands to draw a hard line on NATO’s expansion, saying that “what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable.” Stephen Walt, Harvard professor of international relations and columnist for Foreign Policy, made a similar argument, puzzling over the fact that while Western countries ruled out fighting on Ukraine’s behalf, “the US negotiating position (and thus NATO’s position as a whole) hasn’t budged at all on the central issue dividing the two sides” — meaning, Ukraine’s status in NATO. He lamented the “black-and-white view of the situation in Ukraine” that holds that “Russia’s stated grievances have no legitimate basis whatsoever; and the only conceivable Western response is to refuse to make any concessions.” Walt’s fellow “realist” thinker John Mearsheimer has been making this case for years, chiding Western officials for continually trying to bring Ukraine into their orbit, leading Russia to take drastic, illegal steps to counteract it. He recently told the New Yorker he believed “all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008,” when Bush made his infamous announcement on Ukraine and Georgia, despite Moscow making it clear “they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand.” Mearsheimer dismissed the idea Putin is bent on conquering a broader swath of Europe to restore the Russian Empire or Soviet Union as an argument “invented” by “the foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more generally,” and believes Kiev can come to some kind of “modus vivendi” with Moscow. Samuel Charap, a Ukraine expert at the RAND Corporation (a Pentagon-aligned think tank originally started by the air force), argued that what had been in early February just the Ukraine “crisis” was “a symptom of [Washington’s] runaway success” after the Cold War. He charged that “Russia is destined to clash again with the United States and its allies over the status of these former Soviet republics unless all parties can agree on a mutually acceptable arrangement for the regional order.” Or see international relations professor Rajan Menon and former George W. Bush national security staffer Thomas Graham, who urged US officials in Politico back in January to stave off war by “accommodating some of Russia’s principal security concerns,” and formalizing “a declared moratorium on the accession of Ukraine, or any other former Soviet state” into NATO for as long as twenty-five years. See the recent comments by the critical Russian sociologist Greg Yudin, who was recently arrested and brutalized at an antiwar protest in Moscow, and who warned just a day before the invasion began that “NATO is certainly a potential military adversary of Russia,” that it “is not a peaceful and innocent alliance,” and that its expansion is “an unfriendly action towards Russia” that “any responsible Russian government should seek to prevent.” The Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko has warned that it was becoming “increasingly clear that a Putin successor, however progressive or democratic they may be, would still see Ukraine’s NATO membership as a threat,” and that among the solutions to the then building crisis was, among other things, “restoring Ukraine’s non-alignment status” and reversing the 2019 amendment that enshrined the goal of “Euro-Atlantic integration” into the country’s constitution. You could go on and on: Katrina vanden Heuvel writing that “NATO now largely exists to manage the risks created by its existence” in the Washington Post; Jeffrey Sachs urging Washington to “compromise on NATO to save Ukraine” in the Financial Times; or Kings College Ukraine expert Anatol Lieven, who has stressed that same history and repeatedly called for solutions like a neutral Ukraine and a moratorium on its entry into the alliance, first to stave off this war and now to end it. In fact, when Lieven convened a collection of former US and British ambassadors and experts in January this year, their consensus was that “the Russian government has not yet decided on war,” and that Washington would “have to go much further” than its initial responses to Moscow’s first negotiation bid. That’s not even getting into the many, many US establishment figures who warned throughout the decades that NATO expansion would eventually provoke the very thing it was meant to be guarding against. First among them is George Kennan, widely regarded as the father of the Cold War containment policy, who presciently warned in 1997 that expanding NATO eastward would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy,” and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Or the eighteen former diplomats who warned the policy risked “significantly exacerbating the instability that now exists in the zone that lies between Germany and Russia, and convincing most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them.” Or the fifty prominent foreign-policy experts, including retired military officers, diplomats, and former senators, who signed on to a letter calling NATO expansion “a policy error of historic proportions” that was “opposed across the entire political spectrum,” and would “strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.” Or Biden’s current CIA director, William Burns, who wrote from Moscow in 1995 that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here,” and that the move was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” Thirteen years later, Burns would inform the Bush administration that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” and that “in more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players,” he had “yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Just two years ago, Burns wrote of how “Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage” and how “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled.” Or the US intelligence agencies, which, according to former intelligence analyst Fiona Hill (now a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution), all opposed the idea of offering membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, only for Bush to override them — now viewed by most foreign policy experts as a key turning point in US-Russian relations after the Cold War and Putin’s own relationship with Washington. Or the numerous other establishment voices, from Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who all made similar criticisms of the policy at the time. In the fervor of war, we are suddenly being told to believe all of these are merely the foolish and traitorous apologetics of Putin sycophants and fringe extremists, invented just now to vindicate Moscow’s invasion and even strengthen Russia. The speed with which these ideas have, in the West, gone from conventional mainstream opinion to treasonous lies and propaganda has been shocking to witness. Explaining War Is Not Justifying It Why is all this important? We have to know how we got to this point, what policy choices we in the West had control over contributed to it, and what we could have done differently. By doing so, we can not only avoid repeating the same mistakes and watching a terrible history replay again and again, but find some political, nonmilitary way out of what’s happening now, and secure a lasting stability for Ukraine and Europe, if not long-term peace. The idea now widely advanced that Putin is an Adolph Hitler–like madman bent on world domination, and that Western policy over the past decades played no meaningful role in the choice he made to launch this atrocious and illegal invasion, is a very convenient one. It’s a convenient one for those Western officials who played leading roles in that policy, including the sitting US president, who led the very first effort to expand NATO. It’s convenient for arms manufacturers and every other corporate leech feeding off endless global conflict. It’s convenient for the war hawks who would cynically use this war to justify breathtakingly dangerous ideas like turning Ukraine into an Afghanistan-like permanent warzone. And, of course, it rules out any diplomatic settlement to end this terrible crime, because a madman who wants to take over the world cannot be negotiated with. Just as important, if we don’t understand how Western policy helped lead to this conflict and we don’t work to veer away from similar mistakes in the future, conflict and war is forever inevitable. As the figures listed above pointed out, opposition in Russia to NATO’s expansion goes well beyond the single figure of Putin. If and when he eventually leaves power, and Western policymakers continue to plow ahead with the policy — having been persuaded by the political and media figures now assuring us that NATO has nothing to do with what’s going on and all this is merely the product of one man’s megalomania — we will likely find that the leadership that replaces him is no less opposed, creating the conditions for a permanent state of conflict. Maybe you disagree with this analysis, or the possible solutions to end this war. You have every right to do so. But to delegitimize them with smears and character assassinations, even cast them as borderline criminal, is outrageous and shocking behavior that risks repeating some of the most shameful episodes of history, such as the disastrous post-9/11 war frenzy, the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s, and the repression and abuses of the 1920s Red Scare and World War I. Trying to explain the role of Western foreign policy in stoking jihadist terrorism doesn’t justify or excuse the atrocity committed on September 11. Understanding how the Treaty of Versailles helped lead to World War II doesn’t justify or excuse Hitler’s invasions that triggered that war. Two weeks ago, these were things that went without saying. Now they’re apparently treasonous. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
|