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      The US Leaves Ukraine to Fight New Cold War With Russia

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      The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression, shaming the rest of the world and the UN Security Council for its failure to protect them. It is an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this conflict before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, and forces hundreds of thousands more to flee. 

      But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.

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      US President Joe Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion on February 24, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in the east of Ukraine. Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, consistent with incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. With nearly 700 OSCE ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as American and British officials claimed.

      Whether the shell-fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war in eastern Ukraine or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend the DPR and LPR from those attacks, making it disproportionate and illegal. 

      The New Cold War

      In the larger context, though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

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      In December 2021, after a summit between Biden and his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with nine articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member, which is not on the table in the foreseeable future in any case. But the Biden administration brushed off Russia’s entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations.

      So, why was negotiating a mutual security treaty so unacceptable that Biden was ready to risk thousands of Ukrainian lives — although not a single American life — rather than attempt to find common ground? What does that say about the relative value that Biden and his colleagues place on American vs. Ukrainian lives? And what is this strange position that the United States occupies in today’s world that permits a US president to risk so many Ukrainian lives without asking Americans to share their pain and sacrifice? 

      The breakdown in US relations with Russia and the failure of Biden’s inflexible brinkmanship precipitated this war, and yet his policy externalizes all the pain and suffering so that Americans can, as another wartime president once said, “go about their business” and keep shopping. America’s European allies, who must now house hundreds of thousands of refugees and face spiraling energy prices, should be wary of falling in line behind this kind of “leadership” before they, too, end up on the front line.

      NATO

      At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved. NATO should have been too since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes. 

      In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovan President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial at The Hague charged with committing appalling war crimes under the cover of NATO bombing, including murder, torture and enforced disappearances. 

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      Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

      In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. At the time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in 30 declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.

      The INF Treaty

      After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has predictably come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. US nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the United Kingdom already have their own nuclear arsenals. US “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border. 

      Another Russian request in its December proposal was for the US to join a moratorium on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. In 2019, both the United States and Russia withdrew from a 1987 treaty, under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Donald Trump, the US president at the time, pulled out of the INF treaty on the advice of his national security adviser, John Bolton.

      None of this can justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine. 

      Neutrality

      There are many successful precedents, like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Costa Rica. Or take the case of Vietnam. It has a common border and serious maritime disputes with China, but Vietnam has resisted US efforts to embroil it in its Cold War with Beijing. Vietnam remains committed to its long-standing “four-nos” policy: no military alliances, no affiliation with one country against another, no foreign military bases and no threats or uses of force. 

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      The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres or a special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the United Nations. This will not be easy. One of the still unlearned lessons of other conflicts is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end war once it has started.

      If or when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow all the people of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO members to live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others. 

      The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

      Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. 

      We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States has committed in its own illegal wars.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Unthinkable: War Returns to Europe

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      War has returned to the European continent. President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is more than a Russian war on one nation. It is a war on the West and everything the West represents — its democracy, rule of law, liberty and the rules-based international world order it has established, largely as a result of America’s military power and the combined economic might of the United States, the European Union and various like-minded nations.

      Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is a Wake-Up Call for Germany

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      Superficially, one might look at the start date of this war as February 24, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. In fact, President Putin declared his war on the West 15 years ago, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference, lambasting the US and its allies for overstepping boundaries, unsettling global order and threatening Russia itself. He was especially sharp in his criticism of the US invasion of Iraq and NATO expansion to include the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

      Putin’s Long-Declared War Against the West

      One year later, in the summer of 2008, Putin launched his first military campaign. Russian forces invaded Georgia, another aspiring democracy, following its (and Ukraine’s) application to NATO. He had drawn his line and made clear he was prepared to resist. In 2014, following the ouster of the pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan Revolution (aka Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity), Russian forces — disguised by the absence of uniform — invaded and captured the Crimea region in southern Ukraine, subsequently annexing it. 

      Shortly afterward, Putin threw his support behind Russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, on the border with Russia. That conflict continued to fester through last week’s invasion.

      As he rationalized in Munich, NATO was advancing east, encircling and threatening Russia. In fact, it was the nations of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus moving West, adopting the Western model of democracy and free economy, and electing to formally associate with them. Their rationale has been made ever clearer now: They feared Russian aggression and sought the security of NATO and the prosperity of the EU. Russia and Putin’s model of one-man rule, fear and intimidation, repression and stymied economic opportunity held no attraction, and even less under some misguided, fever-dream version of a resurrected Russian empire.

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      It may have been easy to compartmentalize Putin’s antagonism as directed solely at former eastern bloc states on Russia’s periphery. But Ukraine and Georgia have always been merely the staging grounds of Putin’s assault on the West. His calculation was that a seemingly enfeebled US, weakened abroad and divided at home, and a fractious and divisive NATO would not respond. They would acquiesce to his vision of a neo-Russian empire and the recently resurgent notion — also supported by China — of the spheres of influence of great powers. He also calculated that Ukraine, after its failure to defend Crimea or defeat the Russian-backed separatists in Donbas, would fold in the face of Russia’s superior military might.

      Putin doubtlessly also realized that Russia is a declining power. The base for its economy, oil and natural gas, while still much in demand, is facing a declining shelf life as advanced countries turn rapidly to renewable energy technologies. Enormously rich in natural resources and even richer in human ingenuity, it is a one-dimensional economy, making it dependent on the vagaries of commodity markets to keep its budget in balance. Its population has been declining over the last decades and is aging. Russia’s status in the global power alignment is fading, and Putin knows it. Now was the time to strike.

      Putin’s whining aside, the invasion of Ukraine was never about the West’s threat to Russia. Democracies go to war only when threatened. In fact, Putin was crystal clear in his purpose when he belittled Ukraine and dismissed its independence in a speech on February 21, a nakedly transparent declaration of Russian expansionism. Holding up NATO as the aggressive villain and Ukraine as an inherent and natural part of greater Russia was a red herring that earned no perch outside his most ardent apologists.

      Calculating Putin Miscalculates

      The reputedly calculating Putin underestimated his immediate enemy, the Ukrainian people, and his ultimate enemy, the West. Nor did he grasp the dimensions of the new kind of war that would result when great powers enter the fray in an overwhelmingly interdependent world. His war has all the signs not only of a hot war but also the Cold War, an economic war, an exponentially more expansive information war than he could have imagined, and a cyberwar.

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      All will claim causalities across the map, most especially in his own country and Ukraine. Importantly, Russia’s vaunted propaganda engine may prove no match for the millions of Ukrainians with cell phones and the hundreds of millions cell phone users around the world supporting them.

      But the economic disruption of the unprecedented sanctions imposed by the rest of the world’s economic powers, save China, suggests that people everywhere will suffer to some degree. Financial flows are massively displaced, most seriously for a Russia that has been effectively cut out of global financial markets. Note the massive falls in Russian financial markets and the Russian ruble, the clearest signs of an economy in freefall as investors and consumers rush to cash out and then run for the exits.

      Even the massive $630 billion in reserves Putin had thought he was so clever in amassing to blunt the anticipated sanctions have become a dead asset. No one will take his dollars, euros, yen or Swiss francs, not even his gold; they’re all toxic now.

      Oil and grain markets have been colossally disrupted. Import-dependent nations, both developed as well as poor, will pay much higher prices, leading to increased inflation and hardship. We should also expect other secondary effects from the war and sanctions.

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      Ukraine has become the proving ground for democracy. Can the immense financial and economic powers amassed by the world’s democracies counter the brute force military power of one country? Nine of the 10 largest economies in the world are democracies, China the lone exception; Russia ranks 12th.

      Democracies run the world’s financial systems from SWIFT to the global financial institutions that fall under the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The US dollar dominates global financial transactions and national reserves. Money has often determined wars’ winners in the past, but never one on the scale of this one, especially when the antagonists wield nuclear weapons.

      It may all fall to the courage and resilience of the valiant Ukrainians. The longer they can hold out against Russia’s onslaught, already fraught with unanticipated planning, logistical and tactical problems and questionable troop morale, the more unbearable the economic costs will become for Russia. 

      Ukraine possesses some of the world’s largest areas of super-rich and fertile black earth. The world is hoping it may also prove to be the perfect soil for democracy to flourish.

      *[An earlier version of this article stated that for “the first time since 1945,” war had returned to Europe. Updated March 2, 2022, at 15:00 GMT.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is a Wake-Up Call for Germany

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      Anyone who has ever studied international relations in the United States has been exposed to the so-called Melian dialogue. The Melian dialogue refers to an episode in the Peloponnesian War, pitting the representative of Melos, a small island, against the representatives of Athens. The Athenians, engaged in a war with Sparta, demanded that the Melians submit to their power, join their side and, in the process, get absorbed into the Athenian empire. 

      Learning Lessons in Ukraine and Beyond

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      In case the Melians refused, the Athenians threatened with complete destruction. The Melians did refuse, pointing out that justice was on their side. In response, the Athenians laid siege on the island, took its main city and, after its surrender, killed every surviving male and sold the women and children into slavery.

      Exigencies of Defense

      One of the central points of the Melian dialogue is the notion that might makes right, or, as the Athenians put it, “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” It is a prime example of what in international relations theory is known as realism. Over the past few decades, realism has gone out of fashion, especially in Western Europe — and for good reason. Nobody is eager to live in a Hobbesian world where life is “nasty, brutish and short” — in Western Europe, nobody more so than the Germans.

      This, of course, has had a lot to do with Berlin’s position during the Cold War, when Germany was, as the prominent German-American political scientist Peter Katzenstein put it, a semi-sovereign state. During the Cold War period, the Federal Republic of Germany pursued a number of strategies that marked a fundamental break with realism: toward its neighbors to the west, a process of economic integration; toward its neighbors to the east (particularly Poland) a policy of détente and reconciliation, which came to be known as Ostpolitik.

      The idea behind Ostpolitik was that rapprochement would ultimately lead to change — Wandel durch Annäherung.  When, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, it appeared that the policy had worked. 

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      The fall of the Berlin Wall was soon followed by the crumbling of the Soviet Union and German unification, which meant that Germany had finally regained its sovereignty — somewhat of a troubling reality, and not only among Germany’s neighbors. In Germany, too, not a few people were worried. They shouldn’t have been. Germany was perfectly adapted to the new times where the “overwhelming exigencies of defence” appeared to have disappeared and where, as the then German minister of defense would put it in 1999, Germany, for the first time in its history, was “only surrounded by friends.” 

      The end of the Cold War appeared to have ushered in a fundamentally now global reality, informed by interdependence, globalization and the end of history. Here, Germany was poised to play a prominent role as the epitome of a “trading state” and a “civilian power.”  

      Civilian powers such as Germany rely on what the American international relations theorist Joseph Nye famously called soft power. Soft power comes from the appeal of consumer products (all those sleek BMWs and Mercedes Benzes) and popular culture (TV series like “Derrick” and Bundesliga clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund with their millions of fans all over the world), rather than from the barrel of the gun. 

      Civilian powers scale down their military. After all, a country surrounded by friends has little use for a military that is up to the task of defending the country. Instead, they are tempted to follow the lead of the Danish Progress party whose late leader proposed in the early 1970s to replace the country’s ministry of defense with an answering machine with the recorded message of “We surrender” in Russian.

      Mugged by Reality

      On February 24, Germany got mugged by reality and was caught flat-footed. In the face of a Melian scenario, Germany is like the emperor with his new clothes. Over the recent days, a growing number of articles have appeared exposing the sorry state of the German military and lamenting its lack of preparedness. Some of the stories would make for great slapstick comedy were they not describing a pathetic reality. 

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      The German soldiers stationed in Lithuania, for instance, not only lack warm jackets but even underwear, or so Germany’s defense ombudsperson has charged. At the same time, the commander of Germany’s army went public, stating that the military “stands more or less naked.” His remarks led France’s center-left daily Liberation to claim that “the generals of the Bundeswehr were ready to lay down the arms at the first Russian attack.” Another French newspaper charged that the German military, because of “deficient gear and the lack of flexibility of its soldiers,” was not in a position to efficiently support its allies in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

      None of this is new. It has all been known for years. In late 2018, for instance, Germany’s weekly Die Zeit raised alarm noting that only a third of the new tanks, fighter jets and helicopters the military had received were ready to use. Four years later, one of Germany’s major dailies, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that the military continued to suffer from massive problems. The German navy, for instance, could count on less than 30% of its ships to be completely ready for action. 

      A few days before the Russian invasion on February 24, the Ukrainian government asked the Germans for anti-tank missile systems. Berlin declined. The reason is simple: Even if it had wanted to, Germany would not be in a position to supply the weapons — they were not available.

      No matter the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Germany will be collateral damage. For too long, the Germans have believed that interdependence and constructive engagement would fundamentally change international relations. This view, however, is based on theoretical constructs that ignore some of the fundamentals informing international relations: the legacy of history and, closely linked to it, emotions. Europe’s history abounds with grievances and resentment, more often than not triggering intense passions. The Balkan wars of the 1990s should have served as a reminder. Instead, they were dismissed as a remnant of a bygone era. 

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      There is another lesson to be drawn from this disaster. A few years ago, two American political scientists coined the phrase “weaponizing interdependence.” The authors used network theory to explain how “coercing actors could exploit interdependence and why targeted actors would find it difficult to evade coercion attempts.” Germany is a textbook case. For decades now, it has increased its dependence on Russian inputs, particularly natural gas and oil.

      The controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline is only the latest example of this. Dependence on Russian commodities was once again informed by the same belief in the power of interdependence to engage the other side in a way beneficial to both. But, once again, the whole thing is in shambles, and Germany is caught in the trap largely of its own making.

      Time for a Change

      But the times there are changing, and rapidly so. Over the weekend, Germany agreed to cut Russian banks off from the SWIFT payment system, announced it would deliver anti-tank missiles to Ukraine (leaving some observers wondering how they suddenly materialized) and sent a military contingent to be stationed in Slovakia. 

      What is much more significant, however, is the fundamental change in tone with regard to Russia, its assault on Ukraine and Germany’s response. The two parties that in the past have been most indulgent toward Vladimir Putin’s regime, the Social Democrats and the Left, have made a complete volte-face, condemning Moscow’s aggression. 

      At the same time, there has been growing recognition on the side of Germany’s left-wing intellectuals that the “times of illusion” are over, that the notion of “wehrhafte Demokratie” — a democracy that can defend itself — only has meaning if it is backed by real forces, and that this will require not only resources but a fundamental change of mindset. The reality is that Germany’s allies will no longer allow Germans to evoke the horrors of the Nazi regime as an explanation for their neglecting its defensive capabilities. 

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      Given the new geostrategic realities, what Western Europe needs, and desperately so, is a strong German military. It must be relieved that on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced an allocation of €100 billion ($112 billion) toward the 2022 military budget, aiming to raise defense spending to over 2% of GDP set out in NATO guidelines going forward; last year, it stood at 1.53%.

      Finally, it seems to dawn in Germany that Putin’s aggression is driven as much by historical revisionism and revanchism as by the boundless drive to snuff out and eradicate Ukraine’s civil society and democratic spirit, turning it into a second Belarus, a Russia en miniature. It is hardly a coincidence that the invasion of Ukraine started almost to the day of the anniversary of the end of Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Moscow regime in February 2014.

      The only one who has remained steadfast in his Putinophilism is former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has always prided himself in his close relationship with the Russian autocrat. Whereas Austria’s ex-chancellor, Christian Kern, and the former French premier, François Fillon, resigned from lucrative posts on the boards of Russian enterprises, Schröder refused to follow suit, much to the embarrassment of the German Social Democrats. 

      But then, Schröder belongs to the same generation as the Putins, Trumps and Xis of this world, old men living in an alternative reality who would like nothing more than to turn back the clock. In Germany, at least, dreams and illusions have given way to a new realism, one that is likely to have profound repercussions not only for Germany but for Europe in general.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Learning Lessons in Ukraine and Beyond

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      Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the international condemnation it has generated contains key lessons for policymakers. They are lessons that should have been learned in past global crises but weren’t. However, the Ukraine crisis offers an opportunity to correct that mistake.

      International Law

      A first lesson is that failure to firmly stand up to violations of international law as they occur convinces trespassers that they can get away with them. It emboldens violators to commit ever more flagrant infringements. Kicking the can down the road by failing to immediately and firmly respond to violations amounts to allowing an open wound to fester. The longer the wound festers, the more difficult, costly and risky it is to cure.

      The last 14 years of Putin’s rule are a case in point. Putin began the recreation of his Russian world in 2008 when he recognized the two Georgian breakaway republics of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. The recognition constituted the first step in Putin’s defining of Russia’s borders in civilizational rather than international legal terms.

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      Putin has made no bones about the fact that he sees territories populated by Russian speakers and adherents of Russian culture as the determinants of Russia’s borders, not international law. Ever since 2008, he has demonstrated his willingness to enforce his definition of Russia’s border with military might.

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      Back then, the international community effectively looked the other way. The failure to stand up to Putin emboldened him six years later to annex Crimea, which is legally part of Ukraine, and foster insurgencies in the Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The United States and Europe responded by slapping Putin’s wrists. The sanctions imposed at the time did little to stop the Russian leader from increasing his war chest or making the cost of continued pursuit of his strongman tactics too costly and risky.

      This month’s Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from the international community’s failure to draw a line in the sand back in 2008 or at the latest in 2014. “The Russian aggression is the result of years of appeasement of Russia by many countries,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

      Human Rights Abuse

      Russia is the most dramatic, most recent example of the cost of not responding firmly and unequivocally to infringements of international law as they occur. Other examples are numerous. They include the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the subsequent military coup in Myanmar, the 2013 toppling of Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president in a takeover by the armed forces, the meek response to the brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims in China, the increasingly blatant discrimination and disenfranchisement of Muslims in India, and missed opportunities to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few.

      All of these examples, like Ukraine, contain lessons the international community asserted that it had learned from World War II. They all contain a lesson that should have been learned long before Ukraine but is undeniably evident in the Eastern European crisis: Abetting violations of human rights encourages and emboldens violations of sovereign, national, ethnic, religious, cultural and gender rights.

      Back in 1989, Genocide Watch Director Greg Stanton warned then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana that “if you don’t do something to prevent genocide in your country, there is going to be a genocide within five years.” Five years later, there was genocide in Rwanda. It is a word of warning that echoes in predictions by Indian journalist Rana Ayyub that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies could lead to large-scale violence against the country’s 200-million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority.

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      It is a warning that reverberates in the contrast between the reception and welcome that European states are justifiably according to refugees from Ukraine compared to the rejection of earlier waves of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. A Moroccan journalist posted a video on Twitter of students from the Arab world and Africa watching buses on the Ukrainian-Polish border pick up Ukrainians every 15 minutes but transporting people from countries beyond Europe only every four hours. The journalist, Anas Daif, reported some students have been stranded for four days on the border trying to escape the war.

      Freedom of Expression

      In a similar vein, prominent BBC journalist Lyse Doucet, reporting from Kyiv, highlighted the fact that humans in distress are humans in distress irrespective of their ethnicity or religion. In a video message, she explained that her reporting on the current crisis in Ukraine prevented her from personally accepting in the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Irbil the 2022 Shifa Gardi Award named after a journalist killed in 2017 in Iraq by a roadside bomb.

      “If anyone knows about the pain and hardship of living with war, it’s the people of Iraq, of Kurdistan. And if anyone knows what it’s like to live in a war that never seems to end, of living with powerful neighbors, and the importance of independent journalism, it is the Kurdish people,” Doucet said.

      Doucet’s message brought it all together: the linkages between failing to stand up early and firmly to flagrant violations of international law, abuse of human rights and suppression of freedom of expression. Kurds formed the bulk of thousands of desperate refugees in Belarus who were trying to cross the border into Poland just four months ago. In contrast to Ukrainians being welcomed with blankets, cots, clothing and hot meals, the Kurds were brutally beaten back as they sought to storm the borders.

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      Iraq, Syria and Turkey may have been different places if Kurdish national and/or cultural rights, which Kurds have asserted for more than a century, had been honored. Instead, the international community abetted repressive policies of both autocratic and democratic governments. Similarly, Ukraine would have been a different place if the international community had stood up to Putin from day one.

      War in Europe Is Nothing New

      It would also be a different place if Europeans had less of a sense of superiority. Many have expressed shock that “this could happen in 21st-century Europe.” Europeans would be better served to recognize that their continent is as prone to conflict as are other parts of the world.

      Ukraine is not the first such incident in Europe. It was preceded by the brutal conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia and the wars of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s that, three decades later, could erupt again. That realization may be seeping in. “War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone,” wrote Telegraph journalist Peter Hannan.

      It’s never too late to learn lessons. The world is finally standing up to Vladimir Putin. Yet there is little indication that the broader lessons Ukraine offers are finally being learned.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      From Repeated Mistakes to an Unmistakable Message

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      Our regularly updated feature Language and the News will continue in the form of separate articles rather than as a single newsfeed. Click here to read yesterday’s edition.

      We invite readers to join us by submitting their suggestions of words and expressions that deserve exploring, with or without original commentary. To submit a citation from the news and/or provide your own short commentary, send us an email.

      February 24: Unmistakable

      Our regular examination of language in the news cycle has been bringing us back to the major international story thus far of 2022. The Russia–Ukraine crisis keeps generating examples of the deliberately twisted and sometimes directly inverted semantics, a trend that will probably continue and perhaps become amplified in the coming weeks and months.

      As a general rule, when politicians claim to be “clear,” the observer can be certain that what they are clear about is at best half the story. Clarity imperceptibly fades into obscurity. It gets worse when the speaker claims that the message is “unmistakable.” Quoted by the New York Times, US President Joe Biden offered a wonderful example of such rhetoric while explaining the measures he is taking to counter Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

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      “Let me be clear: These are totally defensive moves on our part,” Biden proclaimed. “We have no intention of fighting Russia. We want to send an unmistakable message, though, that the United States, together with our allies, will defend every inch of NATO territory and abide by the commitments we made to NATO.”

      This is the standard mantra in Washington. Economic sanctions are always intended to punish civilian populations in the hope that they will revolt against their government. They should never be thought of as aggressive or offensive, not even partially. Perish the thought. Biden makes that “clear” when he claims they are “totally” defensive, like a soldier in the field raising a shield before his face to deflect an enemy’s arrow. 

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      As for the “unmistakable message,” it may simply mean that the White House has made so many mistaken guesses in recent weeks about the date of a Russian invasion, it is now necessary to inform people that the latest message, for a change, is not just one more in an endless series of mistakes.

      Biden also called Vladimir Putin’s move “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.” For the moment, it is an aggressive incursion into contested Ukrainian territory, but it isn’t an invasion. It can only be deemed the beginning of an invasion if there actually is an invasion that follows from it. There is no question that President Putin’s initiative violates international law, but that alone doesn’t make it a military invasion.

      Biden should know something about what invasions look like. He was, after all, the key Democrat, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to champion US President George W. Bush’s tragically planned and utterly unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, a well-documented episode Biden persistently denied during his election campaign.

      Putin’s move may be a prelude to an invasion, but preludes only become real when the event they are preparing becomes real. The real reason Biden calls it “the beginning of an invasion” is to save face in an attempt to maintain a modicum of credibility regarding his administration’s warnings in recent weeks. He may well be hoping it turns into a Russian invasion just to prove his repeated predictions were somewhat correct.

      Then there’s Biden’s promise to defend “every inch of NATO territory.” Everyone knows Ukraine is not NATO territory. So why offer such a justification? Perhaps Biden’s reason for saying this on record is that, when Republicans and the more bellicose Democrats begin castigating him for failing to support Ukraine militarily, he will be able to use Ukraine’s non-NATO status to defend his policy. At the same time, he is getting the best of both worlds. He may thus safely stand back and watch a bloody proxy war proceed, much as Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden have done for the past seven years with Yemen.

      Finally, Biden made the important decision to call off the proposed summit meeting with Putin. At the same time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that should have taken place on February 24. “Now that we see the invasion is beginning,” Blinken explained, “and Russia has made clear its wholesale rejection of diplomacy, it does not make sense to go forward with that meeting at this time.” 

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      That statement on Blinken’s part is literally a “wholesale rejection.” He even used the expression “pretense of diplomacy,” disparaging the very idea of trying to solve the problem rather than let it get worse. Lavrov had made no attempt to scotch the meeting. In its coverage, Reuters added that “Blinken said he was still committed to diplomacy.” Except, apparently, when he’s committed to preventing it from happening. In former times, diplomacy consisted of getting a conversation going whenever a serious problem arose. It certainly did not consist of explaining why there was no need for a dialogue.

      In the light of this new style of diplomacy, historians may now find it an interesting counterfactual exercise to wonder what might have happened during the Cuban missile crisis had either John F. Kennedy or Nikita Khrushchev objected that diplomacy was a waste of time. 

      Why Monitoring Language Is Important

      Language allows people to express thoughts, theories, ideas, experiences and opinions. But even while doing so, it also serves to obscure what is essential for understanding the complex nature of reality. When people use language to hide essential meaning, it is not only because they cynically seek to prevaricate or spread misinformation. It is because they strive to tell the part or the angle of the story that correlates with their needs and interests.

      In the age of social media, many of our institutions and pundits proclaim their intent to root out “misinformation.” But often, in so doing, they are literally seeking to miss information.

      Is there a solution? It will never be perfect, but critical thinking begins by being attentive to two things: the full context of any issue we are trying to understand and the operation of language itself. In our schools, we are taught to read and write, but, unless we bring rhetoric back into the standard curriculum, we are never taught how the power of language to both convey and distort the truth functions. There is a largely unconscious but observable historical reason for that negligence. Teaching establishments and cultural authorities fear the power of linguistic critique may be used against their authority.

      Remember, Fair Observer’s Language and the News seeks to sensitize our readers to the importance of digging deeper when assimilating the wisdom of our authorities, pundits and the media that transmit their knowledge and wisdom.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      An Expert Explains Why We Need a New Cold War With China

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      Michael Beckley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.” He has no time for the commonly held thesis that America’s hegemonic power is in decline. He even claims that “it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991.” If the regular expansion of the US defense budget is any indication, he may be right. President Joe Biden has just promised to increase it yet again, this time to $770 billion.

      In a new article for Foreign Affairs bearing the title, “Enemies of My Enemy: How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order,” Beckley makes the case that having and sharing an easily identified enemy is the key to effective world government. The Cold War taught him that “the liberal order” has nothing to do with good intentions and being a force for good. Instead, it thrives on a strong dose of irrational fear that can be spread among friends.

      Ukraine’s Tug of War and the Implications for Europe (Language and the News)

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      As the Republican presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush produced these immortal words: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.” Probably unwittingly, Beckley echoes Bush’s wisdom. “Today, the liberal order is fraying for many reasons,” Beckley writes, “but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago.”  Unlike the clueless Bush, Beckley now knows who the “they” is. It’s China.

      Embed from Getty Images

      History has moved on. China can now replace the Soviet Union as the star performer. Bush proposed Islamist terrorism as his coveted “them,” but that ultimately failed. The terrorists are still lurking in numerous shadows, but when President Biden withdrew the last American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, he definitively delegitimized it as a threat worthy of spawning a new Cold War. And now, even while Russia is being touted as the best supporting actor, the stage is finally clear to push China into the limelight.

      Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Shared enemy:

      A powerful nation whose negative image can be modeled by another powerful nation in such a way that its name alone inspires fear, to the point that it may be generously offered to governments of weaker nations on the pretext of forming a profitable alliance

      Contextual Note

      For Beckley, US hegemony needs China’s help. Now that the Middle Kingdom has now achieved the status of a high-profile enemy to be generously shared with obedient allies, the liberal order may thrive again, as it did during the Cold War. For Beckley, it is China, not Donald Trump, that will “make America great again.”

      Some may find Beckley’s historical logic slightly skewed. He explains that the modern liberal order was “designed to defeat … Soviet communism.” If it was “designed,” what does he have to say about the designer? Who indeed could that have been, and what were their real motives? Could it have been the Dulles brothers, whose combined clout in the Dwight Eisenhower years allowed them to dictate US foreign policy? More alarmingly, Beckley seems to be suggesting that without a pretext for paranoia, the liberal order would not or could not exist.  

      Beckley is probably right but for reasons he might not appreciate. The idea of needing an identifiable enemy stands as a purely negative justification of the liberal order. But Beckley has already dismissed the idea that it is all about bettering the world. He seems to underestimate the need ordinary Americans have to think of their country as a shining city on a hill, endowed with the most powerful military in the history of the world whose mission is not to maraud, destroy, displace populations and kill, but to intervene as a “force for good.”

      It’s not as if social harmony was the norm in the United States. The one thing that prevents the country from descending into a chaos of consumer individualism, or from becoming a nation populated by angry Hobbesian egos intolerant of the behavior of other egos, is the ideology that Beckley denigrates but which politicians continue to celebrate: the “enlightened call to make the world a better place.” Americans would fall into a state of despair if they no longer believed that their exceptional and indispensable nation exists as an ideal for humanity.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      But recent events have begun to shake their faith in what now appears to be a manifestly not very egalitarian democracy. Increasingly oligarchic, if not plutocratic, American society remains “liberal” (i.e., free) for those who control the growing mountains of cash that visibly circulate among the elite but rarely trickle down to meet any real human needs.

      As the defender of an idealized liberal order, Beckley is right to assume that, with so many factors undermining the American consensus, the cultivation of a shared enemy may be the necessary key to maintaining that order. Fear has always had the unique virtue of diverting attention from serious and worsening problems. Between income inequality, climate change and an enduring pandemic punctuated by contestable government mandates, people’s attention definitely needs to be diverted.

      Historical Note

      Michael Beckley is certainly very knowledgeable about China. He admires Chinese civilization and many of its accomplishments. He also believes a war between the United States and China is far from inevitable. Moreover, he is a realist. He admits that, as many people across the globe affirm, the US represents the biggest threat to world peace. At the same time, he believes “that the United States has the most potential to be the biggest contributor to peace.” He lucidly notes that “when the United States puts its weight behind something the world gets remade, for better or for worse.” But, having said this, he eludes the implicit moral question. If both the better and worse are possible, the rest of the world should be the ones to decide every time its reality is “remade” whether that remaking was for the better or the worse.

      As Pew studies show, most people outside the US appear to believe that American initiatives across the globe over at least the past half-century have been predominantly for the worse. Beckley himself cites Iraq and Vietnam as egregious examples. But, ever the optimist, he sees in what he calls the ability of the “system of US alliances” to create “zones of peace” the proof that the worse isn’t as bad as some might think.

      Beckley recognizes that alliances are not created out of generosity and goodwill alone. In his influential book, “Super-Imperialism,” the economist Michael Hudson describes the workings of what is known as the “Washington Consensus,” a system of economic and military control that, in the decades after World War II, managed, somewhat perversely, to miraculously transfer the immense burden of its own debt, generated by its military adventurism, to the rest of the world. The “Treasury-bill Standard,” an innovation President Richard Nixon called into being to replace the gold standard in 1971, played a major role. With the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, Hudson notes that “foreign governments were obliged to invest their surplus dollars in U.S. Treasury securities.” It was part of a complex financial, diplomatic and military system that forced US allies to finance American debt.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Beckley’s  “zones of peace” are zones of dependence. Every country that participated in the system found itself forced to hold US Treasury bonds, including China. They thus had an interest in maintaining the stability of a system that dictated the flow of money across the globe. To a large extent, that is still the case. It explains why attempts to dethrone the dollar are systemically countered, sometimes violently through military action (as in Libya, to scotch Muammar Gaddafi’s plans for a pan-African currency).

      None of that worries the eternal optimist Beckley, clearly a disciple of Voltaire’s Pangloss. He believes that — even while admitting the US has “wrecked the world in various ways” — its “potential” for peace trumps the reality of persistent war and that its “capability to make the world much more peaceful and prosperous” absolves it from the wreckage it has already produced. 

      From a cultural point of view, Beckley is right. Americans always believe that what is “potential” trumps what is real and that “capability” effaces past examples of incapable behavior. That describes a central feature of American hyperreality.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Ukraine’s Tug of War and the Implications for Europe (Language and the News)

      by

      To our readers: Our regularly updated feature Language and the News will continue in the form of separate articles rather than as a single monthly collection (click here to read previous entries).

      We invite readers to join us by submitting their suggestions of words and expressions that deserve exploring, with or without original commentary. To submit a citation from the news and/or provide your own short commentary, send us an email.

      February 23: Effective Veto

      On Monday evening in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a long, emotional presentation of all the historical reasons for which Russia’s sense of betrayal by interests in the West justified declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine autonomous political entities, implicitly compromising the territorial integrity of an independent nation.

      Putin’s argument reflected more than a simple statement of preferences. His action, decreeing the autonomy of Donetsk and Luhansk and subsequently sending Russian troops to protect them, literally violated international law as it is understood and practiced today. It provoked immediate condemnation from all sides and a round of previously promised sanctions from the United States and Europe. It stood, nevertheless, as a sincere statement of historical fears not just of the Russian government, but also the Russian people, who have had three decades to define their appreciation of the nature of Western political and economic domination.

      When Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect in Eastern Europe (Language and the News)

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      In the aftermath of Monday’s events, Al Jazeera helpfully listed “5 things we need to know about Putin’s decision.” After briefly mentioning Russia’s demands concerning NATO, the article notes that “Western leaders have rejected those demands. They say the Kremlin cannot be allowed an effective veto on Kyiv’s foreign policy decisions and have defended NATO’s ‘open-door policy,’ which grants any European nation the right to ask to join.”

      The Western position relies on accepting a basic principle of international law as it is understood in the age of the nation-state: the notion of sovereignty. The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “ the power of a country to control its own government” and alternatively as “the power or authority to rule.” The Oxford Public International Law website, in its first paragraph, notes, with considerably more precision, that “sovereignty, ie of supreme authority within a territory, is a pivotal principle of modern international law. What counts as sovereignty depends on the nature and structure of the international legal order and vice-versa.” In other words, the concept contains a lot of ambiguity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In paragraph 156 of the same article, thousands of words later, we discover that the preceding 155 paragraphs have not clarified the issue. “Difficult questions,” it concludes, “pertain to the localization of the co-originality between international standards of human rights and democracy and hence to the relationship between them when either of them or both have their sources in international law.” In other words, as any well-informed farmer in Iowa might say, it just ain’t that easy to draw any cut-and-dried conclusions.

      East Coast American jurists have, nevertheless, decided that on the question of NATO, Ukraine’s sovereignty — even after the Minsk accords, which, as Putin complains, have never been truly applied — includes the right to select the partners with which it wishes to ally. The lawyers are technically correct to note that if Russia succeeded in preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, that would be a breach of Ukrainian sovereignty. Al Jazeera describes it as giving Russia “an effective veto.” 

      The Russians see it differently. And the Americans would probably secretly agree. As a member of NATO, nations compromise their sovereignty by giving the alliance — clearly led by the US — an “effective veto” in many facets of their own security policy, even, to some extent, in their internal politics. But none of that is official. It is merely “effective.” The European nations, especially France and Germany, have discovered and begun reacting to the nature of that effective veto. There have been signs that they are beginning to champ at the bit. But in the current crisis, they have agreed to remain in line. 

      Depending on how the crisis plays out, the stirrings of a movement toward the independence of Europe’s security with regard to the US are likely to grow into a serious project. Those stirrings were first prompted by Donald Trump’s ambiguous attitude toward NATO and hostile attitude toward Europe. More recently, French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed the idea forward, specifically in response to the growing Ukraine crisis. 

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      There is no telling at this point in which direction the crisis will evolve. It could degenerate into a local struggle for power or it could implicate the political future of Ukraine and beyond. If it does spread beyond its current borders and if, as a further consequence, that aggravates an already existing energy crisis due to Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas, the current sense of solidarity with the US accepted by many European nations will be further weakened, if not shattered.

      For the moment, US President Joe Biden may be focused more on the kind of strongman posturing deemed necessary for improving the chances of the Democratic Party in November’s midterm elections At the same time, he is certainly hoping to keep Europe in tow inside NATO. But if things get out of control, and Biden’s posturing has already aggravated that risk, the United States may in the end lose the “effective veto” it has exercised for decades over everything that happens in Europe.

      Why Monitoring Language Is Important

      Language allows people to express thoughts, theories, ideas, experiences and opinions. But even while doing so, it also serves to obscure what is essential for understanding the complex nature of reality. When people use language to hide essential meaning, it is not only because they cynically seek to prevaricate or spread misinformation. It is because they strive to tell the part or the angle of the story that correlates with their needs and interests.

      In the age of social media, many of our institutions and pundits proclaim their intent to root out “misinformation.” But often, in so doing, they are literally seeking to miss information.

      Is there a solution? It will never be perfect, but critical thinking begins by being attentive to two things: the full context of any issue we are trying to understand and the operation of language itself. In our schools, we are taught to read and write, but, unless we bring rhetoric back into the standard curriculum, we are never taught how the power of language to both convey and distort the truth functions. There is a largely unconscious but observable historical reason for that negligence. Teaching establishments and cultural authorities fear the power of linguistic critique may be used against their authority.

      Remember, Fair Observer’s Language and the News seeks to sensitize our readers to the importance of digging deeper when assimilating the wisdom of our authorities, pundits and the media that transmit their knowledge and wisdom.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      India Disappoints Its Friends and Admirers

      by

      India’s abstention in a recent vote at the UN Security Council over Russian threats to Ukraine raises serious questions over India being a key ally of the West in the years to come. Indian leaders failed to stand up for Ukrainian sovereignty because of India’s close relations with Russia, a major supplier of military equipment.

      For anyone who wants to explain away India’s conduct at the United Nations as an act of national interests, there is more to consider. India is sliding deeper into Hindu — as opposed to a diverse Indian — nationalism, diminishing its ability to be a long-term partner for Western nations.

      Modi’s India Is Becoming a Farce

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      India’s slowing economic growth, declining investment in its military capabilities and social unrest have prevented the country from modernizing its army and fulfilling its strategic goals. But it is the ideology of its current leaders that is jeopardizing the notion of India as a dependable partner of the US in the Indo-Pacific region. 

      Instead of investing in human capital and health care, the focus of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been on rewriting history through crowdsourcing. Instead of further opening the Indian economy through policies and reforms that would boost growth, protectionism and regulatory policies are rising. India is slipping on the global freedom and democracy indices, with Freedom House downgrading it to “partly free.”

      “Undivided India”

      Leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continue to mobilize India’s majority Hindus to vote for it by targeting religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians. They describe Hinduism as an Indian religion, while Islam and Christianity are denigrated as “foreign” faiths transplanted onto India’s soil. Extremist Hindu leaders, including some from the ruling party, have even gone so far as to call for genocide against 200 million Indian Muslims. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      A 2021 Pew Survey on “Religion in India” demonstrated that tolerance for other faiths remains strong within Indian society. But a larger number of the majority (Hindus) now see religion as the core of their identity and support calls for a Hindu rashtra (state). This creates a dilemma for relations between India and other countries.

      For example, Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister of the state of Uttarakhand, which borders Tibet and Nepal, was embroiled in controversy for something he posted on Twitter six years ago. The tweet showed a map claiming South and Southeast Asia as part of an “undivided India,” known as Akhand Bharat. In December 2021, an Indian broadcaster showed the entire region from the Middle East through South and Southeast Asia as belonging to Akhand Bharat, representing the reunification of territories influenced by India during ancient times.

      This undermines India’s projection of itself as a pluralist and open society, where minorities were respected, not just tolerated. For six decades after independence in 1947, India’s pluralism created a groundswell of respect, goodwill and admiration throughout the free world. Even India’s non-alignment during the Cold War did not interfere with its positive image. Most Americans appreciated Indian democracy and diversity and showed understanding when poverty-ridden India preferred not to side with the United States against the Soviet Union.

      Things Have Changed

      But things have changed since the end of the Cold War. India has made significant progress in reducing poverty. For two decades, there has been talk of India as a rising power. Americans have expected India to boost its economic growth, modernize its military and play a bigger role in confronting China. In 2010, President Barack Obama declared relations between India and the United States as the “defining partnership of the 21st century.”

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      That desire keeps getting thwarted by India’s leadership, particularly Prime Minister Modi and his allies in the BJP. Thus, India’s economic growth has slowed down, even before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and is unlikely to recover quickly. More significantly, India continues to expand trade with China, reaching $125 billion in 2021. This is despite China’s military pressure on India along their disputed border. That should lay to rest the expectation of India confronting China anytime soon.

      Moreover, the commitment to democracy, human rights and liberal values, which made India a natural Western partner, appear under increasing threat.

      Americans who have spent the last few years praising India also need some appraising of India. It might be time to acknowledge that India’s performance has been underwhelming to merit the kind of expectations that have formed the basis of recent US policy.   

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More