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NATO Ramps Up Rhetoric Against China & Russia. Is Biden Leading the U.S. into a New Cold War?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
JUNE 15, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/15/ ... ia_threats

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

GUESTS: Stephen Wertheim: director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School.
LINKS
Stephen Wertheim on Twitter
"Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn't Love NATO"
"Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy"

China says NATO is adopting a “Cold War mentality” after the military alliance singled out China and Russia for criticism during a summit in Brussels. In its final communiqué, NATO leaders said, “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.” NATO leaders also criticized Russia and called on Moscow to withdraw troops from Ukraine, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova. Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, says he is concerned that the Biden administration is “moving toward a quite hostile posture toward China and Russia simultaneously.” He also says policymakers need to urgently reevaluate the purpose of NATO, which he says could fuel greater conflict. “Is that really what the American people need for the rest of the 21st century?” he asks.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

China is warning NATO is adopting a “Cold War mentality” after the military alliance singled out China and Russia for criticism during the NATO summit in Brussels that just wrapped. President Biden successfully pushed NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to declare China to be a security risk for the first time. In its final communiqué, NATO leaders said, quote, “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order,” unquote. NATO leaders also criticized Russia and called on Moscow to withdraw troops from Ukraine, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova.

This is President Biden speaking in Brussels Monday.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: There is a growing recognition over the last couple years that we have new challenges. And we have Russia that is not acting in a way that is consistent with what we had hoped, and as well as China.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden spoke alongside NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who also criticized China.

JENS STOLTENBERG: We are concerned by China’s coercive policies, which stand in contrast to the fundamental values enshrined in the Washington Treaty. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal with more warheads and a large number of sophisticated delivery systems. … NATO leaders called on China to uphold its international commitments and to act responsibly in the international system, including in space, cyber and maritime domains, in keeping with its role as a major power.

AMY GOODMAN: The Chinese Mission to the European Union responded to the NATO summit by saying, quote, ”NATO is slandering China’s peaceful development and misjudging the international situation and its own role,” end-quote.

Today, President Biden is meeting with European Union leaders before heading to Geneva for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We’re joined now by the historian Stephen Wertheim, director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, author of the book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. He has a new article in The New York Times headlined “Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Stephen Wertheim. Why don’t you talk about the NATO summit, this first-ever hit on China, in the way it was framed in the communiqué? Is President Biden leading to a new Cold War, both with China and Russia?

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: It’s nice to be with you.

I am concerned that, indeed, the administration may be moving toward a quite hostile posture toward China and Russia simultaneously. If it is doing so, it would be merely continuing a trend from the Trump administration, I must say.

That said, though I think you are right to spotlight what was most remarkable about the outcome of yesterday’s NATO summit — namely, the identification of China as posing, quote-unquote, “systemic challenges” to the so-called rules-based international order — I do think it’s actually quite worrying, as far as the European members of NATO are concerned. Europe has, for quite some time, been reluctant to cast China as a threat, for understandable reasons. Many Europeans, including the leading powers of Germany and France, don’t want to make a choice, economically or otherwise, between the United States and China or between the United States and Russia. And it has been the United States that has been most concerned about the threats from both countries. And so, I think the NATO communiqué reflects NATO’s desire to at least look like the European members are as concerned about China as the United States. But to the extent that the United States will indeed focus on competition with China, in the longer term, that heralds a turn toward Asia and, therefore, away from Europe.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stephen Wertheim, I wanted to ask you about this whole issue of this systemic challenge. The last time I looked, the United States had 800 military bases and installations in about 70 countries around the world. And apparently, China only has four military bases anywhere in the world. They’ve got one in Argentina. They’ve got a small one in Djibouti, which is part of the whole international campaign against piracy. They’ve got one in Myanmar, and they’ve got one in Tajikistan. This doesn’t sound like much of a threat to NATO or to the United States. And we’re not even mentioning that Turkey has expended all kinds of military bases, as a member nation of NATO, all around the world in recent years. So, why is this obsession with presidents of the U.S., whether it’s Biden or Trump, in continuing to paint China as some kind of a threat — not an economic competitor, which it is, and a growing economic competitor, but as a threat?

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Well, it is worrying for the reason you say. The language of systemic competition and challenge to the rules-based international order seems to lump all of the issues that China’s rise throws up. It lumps them together into one thing that seems to require a response in every domain. But China’s record militarily is vastly different from that of even the United States over the last few decades, I’m sorry to say. It’s not China that has scattered its troops all around the world on bases, as you say, or pursued missions to overturn regimes.

China’s behavior is very worrying in a lot of respects. And I do actually think that the United States and Europe have a lot to cooperate on in terms of setting standards for technologies, for digital, to set rules economically that might constrain Chinese action to cooperate on climate change. There’s plenty of things for the United States and Europe to do together. That’s valuable. And that will, to some degree, constrain Chinese action, and that’s a good thing.

But NATO is a military alliance. We have to remember that. And so, for NATO to be casting China in this way suggests that it does view China as something of a threat, although the NATO communiqué was careful to use the word “threat” toward Russia, but to use the lesser — less intense word “challenge” when it came to China.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering if you could comment on the G7, the new initiative they’re calling Build Back Better for the World, or B3W, as a possible alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, because I don’t think many people in the United States appreciate the impact that China’s Belt and Road Initiative has had in the developing world, and also, in the period of the pandemic, its efforts to export vaccines. I think it’s now — China has already exported 700 million doses to the rest of the world, which is about what the G7 is promising to do in the future. And it’s already, my understanding is, providing 20 million vaccinations per day to its own people. Whereas here in the United States we’re at 1, 2 million vaccinations per day, they’re doing 20 million per day. How does this, both the Belt and Road Initiative and its vaccine diplomacy, having an impact on how the rest of the world sees China?

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: We saw the G7 on Friday act as though it needs to really meet China’s activity in both of these domains — vaccines and development aid. And that could be a good thing if it ends up generating productive forms of competition, if it means that the G7 become more generous with their provision of vaccine doses, if it means that development aid becomes more plentiful, which it has not been, from the West.

This Build Back Better for the World thing is mostly a slogan or a hashtag at this point. It’s got an abbreviation, the three Bs or whatever it is, before it really has substance. So we’ll have to see what actually comes of it.

The worrying aspect, though, would be that rather than create a kind of a race to the top, we have a race to the bottom. And for the developing world, there are increasing strings attached, whether they make a choice between China’s aid or U.S.-led Western aid.

So, we need only to think back to the Cold War to think about what may be in store going forward, if indeed this kind of intense security competition, something like a Cold War, does set in between the West and China. On the one hand, in the Cold War, some members of the Global South were able to use their leverage, to use the interest of both sides to try to play them off each other and obtain more benefits. That could be good in certain circumstances. But then sometimes they found out that the superpowers were not pleased if they would take aid from one side, and such aid was cast as a threat to the other side and could lead to even the overthrow of governments.

So, at this early stage, I don’t think we know which dynamic will prevail, but I have to say that the G7 did not come up with a terribly impressive number of vaccines that the members pledged to provide to the international facility that will be distributing vaccines. It was under a billion doses. Many, many more doses are needed, multiples of that number, in order to vaccinate the world. Now, perhaps this meeting will generate some momentum and further gains going forward, but it disappointed a lot of people, and there was a lot of criticism from, you know, the former U.K. leader, Gordon Brown, and WHO officials.

AMY GOODMAN: You have, for example, in Trinidad and Tobago, the United States pledged something like 500 vaccines to Trinidad and Tobago; China, 200,000. But I wanted to ask you — in your piece in The New York Times, you write, “The danger of permanent subordination to America has started to register in European capitals, long solicitous of American commitment. President [Emmanuel​] Macron of France has accused NATO of experiencing 'brain death' and proposed creating an independent European army,” independent of the United States. Can you talk about this? While there’s a lot of backslapping and “Oh, we’re back together again” in this 72-year-old military alliance that Trump said he wanted to get rid of, you also have a lot of tension here between European leaders and the United States, especially in the push against the pushback against China and Russia.

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Yeah, I think this is the main story, actually, of the NATO summit. The narrative that NATO wants to tell is about all these actions that will be taken against China and Russia, but very little under the surface was this notion that America’s commitment to NATO has come under question. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there’s a reckoning with whether the interests of the United States and the interests of Europe and its leading powers really do align so closely as to bind them into this military alliance.

And so, President Biden was intent on having a clear statement that America is back, and he repeated that America has a “sacred obligation,” “sacred” commitment — his words — to the collective defense provision of NATO. But this comes after, you know, not only the Trump presidency, but stirrings within European capitals to realize that, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it, Europe must truly take its destiny into its own hands. And now “strategic autonomy” has become the watchword in Brussels, where the idea is that, in some fashion, it would be that EU, independent of the United States, outside of NATO, that would become more of a force in security and military affairs. I think that’s quite a sensible idea at this point in history. And I think even Biden understands that his words about a “sacred” commitment matter much less than what America actually does, not just under his administration, but long after.

And in addition to that, I think we’ve come to a kind of inflection point in the history of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s now very hard to see how NATO could possibly expand any further. And yesterday, the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, tried to send out a tweet that he had gotten these assurances that Ukraine would indeed become a member of NATO, which it’s been on a path to becoming — a very slow path, we should say — since 2008. And Biden was not very thrilled with that, it seemed, from the subsequent press conference, in which he said, “Well, Ukraine has to meet its obligations to become a member. We’ll see.” You know, the jury is not out, essentially. And I think we have come to a point where it’s just very implausible, frankly, that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members and really pose a risk of direct conflict with Russia.

So, what the Biden administration has not done is close the door on further expansion of NATO. And that might be, frankly, a valuable step, not just for the United States and for the other members of NATO, but even for Ukraine itself, which is hoping for membership, but I fear it’s being led down a false path, because the fact is that Germany and France oppose Ukraine’s membership. They oppose it for very good reasons, because it risks conflict and further conflict, given that there is an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: So, president —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’m wondering — back in October, you wrote a piece headlined “America Has No Reason to Be So Powerful.” And I’m wondering what the — given the fact, as I mentioned before, this continued huge military footprint of the United States around the world, once you have such a humongous military-industrial complex, it must always find enemies, doesn’t it, to be able to justify its continued existence? And to what degree can the public, or even some political leaders, break away from this sense that the United States must be the policeman of the world?

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: I share that concern. And I think the fact that the United States had built up not just its military-industrial complex domestically, but also its relationships and military positions globally, that explains a lot of the kind of inertia that we saw after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when you would think that the reason for being of this massive national security state had gone away.

That said, I think we are seeing stirrings, at least, of change over the last decade or so. Everybody has to understand now that we are no longer living in the unipolar moment of the 1990s, when the United States was utterly dominant. Through that decade, it could cut its defense spending as a percentage of GDP only to emerge in a more unrivaled position than ever before by the end of the decade. Well, the rest of the world has not exactly caught up, but other countries have asserted themselves, and China, most of all, has dramatically risen economically, with military growth to match its economic growth.

So, I think that, you know, most people in Washington, even if they don’t agree with some of what I write, understand that real change is necessary, and the United States cannot possibly continue to be the guarantor of about half of the world against the other half of the world where most of humanity are, thus turning that half into explicit or implicit threats.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Wertheim, I wanted to ask you about what’s about to happen on Wednesday. That’s the Biden-Putin summit in Geneva. In a new interview on NBC, Putin criticized the United States for placing troops near the Russian border.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] Imagine that we sent our troops into direct proximity to your borders. What would be your response? We didn’t do that. We did it in our territory. You conducted war games in Alaska. Well, God bless you, but you crossed an ocean close to our borders, brought thousands of personnel and thousands of units of military equipment. And yet you believe that we are acting aggressively and somehow you’re not. Just look at that: pot calling the kettle black.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to this and also this back-and-forth? You know, President Biden calling Putin a killer, then NBC asked Putin about that, he laughed. And then, when Biden was asked about Putin laughing, Biden laughed.

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Well, I do think that both leaders are somewhat toning down their rhetorical barrages in advance of their summit, and that’s probably a good thing. I do want to give credit to the Biden administration and the president, in particular, for staunchly defending the value of diplomacy and making a point that the point of diplomacy is to meet with leaders of countries with whom we have issues; otherwise, we can pack it up, in terms of our diplomacy. So, that’s exactly right. And he’s trying to kind of tone down the, I would say, overheated rhetoric and personal rhetoric toward Vladimir Putin.

I hope that the summit will prove productive beyond the symbolism, which is not without value itself. But the broader pattern, I think, needs to be considered, of U.S. policy, where indeed the United States has placed troops and made defense commitments that now span most of Europe, going right up to the borders of Russia in the cases of the Baltics and with Ukraine having a path, a potential path, toward membership in the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

And it isn’t surprising, and indeed was predicted by many people, left and right and center, back in the 1990s, when NATO expansion was first put on the table and first endorsed — the Senate in 1998 held a vote to admit the first three new members of NATO. It was predicted at that time by many people — my piece in yesterday’s New York Times cites the Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, that the expansion of NATO would be seen by Russia, could not be seen otherwise by Russia, except as a threat to itself, even if, for some period of time, it wouldn’t have the capacity to respond, given its economic travails in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And now that expansion has been taken, I fear, too far.

And so, we’ve created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And this is not to defend many of the actions that Russia has taken, including the annexation of Crimea, its support for separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine, but, you know, wise diplomats and political leaders will understand how other countries view their vital interests and listen to those countries when they repeatedly make clear what those vital interests are. So, I fear that we’ve set ourselves on a path of a self-fulfilling prophecy in generating conflict. And what I worry about is that if the United States, in particular, doesn’t break this pattern, it sets us up for the next two, three decades — my lifetime, my children’s lifetime — to be, at best, involved in intense standoffs with Russia and China, and perhaps others around the world. And at worst, it sets us up for a great power war, for World War III. Is that really what the American people need for the rest of the 21st century?

AMY GOODMAN: Historian Stephen Wertheim, I want to thank you for being with us, director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Times, “Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.” His book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.

Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.
by Stephen Wertheim
The New York Times
June 14, 2021

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Mr. Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, is the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Even before today’s NATO summit, President Biden settled the most important question: He affirmed America’s commitment to defend the alliance’s 30 members by force. And despite divisions on many other foreign policy issues, his party stands in lock step behind him. To most Democrats, alliances symbolize international cooperation. Proof positive is that Donald Trump supposedly sought to tear them down.

Yet current progressive enthusiasm for NATO is anomalous. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its original reason for being, skeptics of the alliance included liberals as much as conservatives. In 1998, 10 Democratic Senators joined nine Republicans in opposing the first, fateful round of NATO enlargement, which would soon extend the alliance to Russia’s border.

Among the dissenters was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In between voting against the first Iraq war in 1991 and the second after Sept. 11, Mr. Wellstone warned that expanding NATO would jeopardize Europe’s hard-won gains. “There is peace between states in Europe, between nations in Europe, for the first time in centuries,” he said. “We do not have a divided Europe, and I worry about a NATO expansion which could redivide Europe and again poison relations with Russia.”

Events have proved him wiser than his party seems to think. The left has ceded criticism of NATO to the right, mistaking armed alliances for friendly partnerships and fixating on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric instead of his actions. (In the end, he reaffirmed every U.S. alliance commitment, embraced NATO’s expansion to Montenegro and North Macedonia, and beefed up U.S. forces in Eastern Europe.) It’s time for Americans to recover their critical faculties when they hear “NATO,” a military alliance that cements European division, bombs the Middle East, burdens the United States and risks great-power war — of which Americans should want no part.

At first, the United States figured it could enlarge its defense obligations under NATO because doing so seemed cost-free. Throughout the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia lay prostrate. The United States, by contrast, could trim its military spending only to enjoy greater pre-eminence than ever. If the Soviet collapse made NATO seem less necessary, it also made NATO seem less risky. Warnings like Mr. Wellstone’s, voiced by many analysts at the time, sounded hypothetical and distant.

But they have gained credence as Russia objected, first with words, eventually with arms, to the expansion of an alliance whose guns had always pointed at Moscow. By 2008, NATO declared its intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine. Each had been a founding republic of the Soviet Union and had territorial disputes with Russia. For each, Russia was willing to fight. It swiftly occupied parts of Georgia. Once Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was overthrown in 2014, Russia seized Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval base, and backed separatists in the Donbas region.

The conflict in Ukraine continues, with no resolution near. Rather than use diplomacy to back an internationally negotiated settlement, the United States has preferred to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. After decades of overreach, the Biden administration now faces a stark choice: commit to fight for Ukraine, creating a serious risk of war with Russia, or admit that NATO expansion has come to an overdue end.

Lacking an adversary of Soviet proportions, NATO has also found new foes “out of area” — its euphemism for waging wars in the greater Middle East. The bombing of Libya in 2011 was a NATO operation, signaling to war-weary Americans that this time the United States had real partners and multilateral legitimacy. The war proved disastrous anyway.

NATO helped fight the forever war in Afghanistan, too. Seeking to support U.S. aims after Sept. 11, it undertook “our biggest military operation ever,” Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg boasted in March. Two decades later, European soldiers are leaving, having failed to remake Afghanistan but perversely succeeded in making NATO seem relevant. Absent the Soviet threat, as Secretary General Stoltenberg admitted, the alliance has had to go “out of area or out of business.”

At least the Middle East contains the real, if receding, threat of terrorism, against which minimal military action can be warranted. But Europe is stable and affluent, far removed from its warring past. America’s European allies provide their people with world-leading living standards. They can also perform the most basic task of government: self-defense. In any case, Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, lacks the capability to overrun Europe, supposing it had any reason to try. If American leaders cannot countenance pulling U.S. forces back from Europe, then from where would they be willing to pull back, ever?

The danger of permanent subordination to America has started to register in European capitals, long solicitous of American commitment. President Emmanuel Macron of France has accused NATO of experiencing “brain death” and proposed creating an independent European army, an idea rhetorically welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. The watchword in Brussels these days is “strategic autonomy,” meaning autonomy from the United States. Europeans scarcely seek to disinvite American forces from their continent. Still, they are finding that cheap security from Washington carries mounting costs: dependence on an erratic superpower, pressure to restrict business with China and Russia, and division in Europe itself.

The real question is what Americans want. They could continue to fetishize military alliances as a “sacred obligation,” as President Biden characterized NATO on Wednesday. Or they could treat them as means to ends — and coercive means that often corrupt worthy ends.

For progressives who seek to end endless wars and prevent new ones, the matter of Europe can no longer be skirted. The United States can trust Europeans to defend Europe. Otherwise, it would seem that America truly intends to dominate the world in perpetuity, or until the day a war so great puts dreams of dominance to rest.

Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) is a historian of U.S. foreign policy, the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Correction: June 15, 2021

An earlier version of this essay mischaracterized the status of certain areas of Georgia. Russia occupied those areas in 2008, but did not officially annex them.

Biden and Putin Agree to Begin Work on Arms Control & Cybersecurity in Effort to Avoid New Cold War
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
JUNE 17, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/17/ ... ms_control

GUESTS
Anatol Lieven: senior fellow for Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
LINKS
Anatol Lieven on Twitter

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Geneva Wednesday for a three-hour summit and agreed to set up working groups to deal with nuclear arms control, as well as cyberattacks. The sides also agreed to send ambassadors back to their posts, restoring “normal diplomatic relations of a kind which exist between most countries on the face of the Earth,” says Anatol Lieven, senior fellow for Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “A more cooperative atmosphere has been established so that the U.S.A. and Russia can work together.” He also discusses ongoing tensions over NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe, American hypocrisy about its actions in other countries and how China’s rise impacts the U.S.-Russian relationship.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday for a three-hour summit. The two leaders of the world’s largest nuclear powers agreed to set up working groups to deal with nuclear arms control, as well as cyberattacks. Biden and Putin also agreed to send ambassadors back to their posts in the United States and Russia. In March, Russia withdrew its ambassador in Washington after Biden called Putin a “killer” during a television interview. The United States then pulled its ambassador in Moscow in April.

After their summit, the two leaders held solo news conferences. This is President Biden.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did what I came to do: number one, identify areas of practical work our two countries can do to advance our mutual interests and also benefit the world; two, communicate directly — directly — that the United States will respond to actions that impair our vital interests or those of our allies; and, three, to clearly lay out our countries’ priorities and our values. So he heard it straight from me.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden went on to warn there would be, quote, “devastating consequences” if jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died. Biden also warned the U.S. would use its significant cyber capability if Russia waged a cyberattack on critical infrastructure in the United States.

Putin described his conversation with Biden as “constructive.”

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] I believe that there was no hostility. On the contrary, our meeting, of course, took place in a principled manner. Our assessments on many points differ, but, in my opinion, both sides demonstrated a desire to understand each other and look for ways to bring their positions closer. The conversation was very constructive.

AMY GOODMAN: After Biden’s news conference ended, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins yelled a question to the president.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I didn’t — I’m not confident he’s changed his behavior. Where the hell — what do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident? I said — I said — what I said was — let’s get it straight: I said what will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating the facts.

KAITLAN COLLINS: But given his past behavior has not changed, and in that press conference, after sitting down with you for several hours, he denied any involvement in cyberattacks, he downplayed human rights abuses, he even refused to say Alexei Navalny’s name — so, how does that account to a “constructive” meeting, as President Putin framed it?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden later apologized, saying to Kaitlan Collins — for being a, quote, “wise guy.”

To talk more about the Biden-Putin summit, we’re joined by Anatol Lieven, senior fellow for Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He’s the author of numerous books on Russia and the former Soviet republics, his most recent book titled Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World. It’ll be released as an updated paperback in September. He’s joining us from Doha.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Anatol Lieven. If you can start off by just laying out what you think was most critical about the summit that took place yesterday between Putin and Biden?

ANATOL LIEVEN: First of all, it restored normal diplomatic relations, of a kind which exist between most countries on the face of the Earth. Ambassadors have gone back. Hopefully, consular officials will go back. You know, ordinary personal exchanges will be restored. And, you know, that is of considerable importance in itself and helps open the way for other things.

Secondly, a more cooperative atmosphere has been established so that the U.S.A. and Russia can work together, as President Biden stressed, in areas where their common interests do actually coincide.

Afghanistan was mentioned. It was mentioned by both leaders in the context of terrorism, but, actually, after the U.S. military withdrawal, Russia and other neighbors of Afghanistan will be critical to the success of any peace process or any hope for stabilizing Afghanistan. So, that was very important.

And we saw the beginnings — I mean, only the beginnings, of course — of talks, which could in the future lead to agreement on further nuclear arms reductions. I mean, in principle, that should not be difficult. I mean, both the U.S.A. and Russia have far, far more missiles than they actually need. China has demonstrated you can have a perfectly credible nuclear deterrent with a fraction of those numbers. And equally importantly, has begun the process, or continued the process, of negotiation of a treaty on cyberspace. That will take a long time and will be very difficult — may not happen, but, you know, you have to start somewhere.

And finally — and I think that is very important — both leaders set out their red lines. At least we know Biden did, because he said so, you know, which is attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, cyberattacks, and if Navalny dies. But Putin restated Russia’s strong opposition to further NATO enlargement, and Russia has made it — well, has actually fought on a couple of occasions over precisely that issue. And Russia has made it clear that in the event of a Ukrainian military offensive against the Russian-protected separatist area of Eastern Ukraine, Russia will also fight. So, I think those are the main positive results of this summit.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Anatol Lieven, I wanted to ask you: In terms of how, especially here in the U.S., the media portray the relations with Russia as Russia being the aggressor and Russian aggression having to be stemmed, could you talk about how, from the Russian perspective, the continued expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is seen as itself unbridled aggression by the West?

ANATOL LIEVEN: Yes. I mean, Russia sees NATO as a deeply anti-Russian organization. And, of course, Russia, like any country, deeply dislikes the idea of a hostile military alliance approaching its borders and taking over its neighbors.

Now, in the case of Ukraine, this is particularly sensitive, because, of course, Ukraine has a very large ethnic Russian minority. And Crimea, which Russia, of course, annexed — this has not been internationally recognized — in 2014, contains one of Russia’s most important and historic military bases at Sevastopol.

So, the Russians, for many, many years, made clear that they would react, if necessary, with force against NATO moves of this kind. There was absolutely no grounds at all to be surprised, therefore, by Russia’s reaction in 2014 to the Ukrainian revolution. And the Russians repeatedly use the phrase “Monroe Doctrine” to say that, look, you know, America has always been bitterly opposed, categorically opposed, to countries in Central America joining any anti-American alliance and has used extremely ruthless measures to prevent that during the Cold War.

So, it’s not necessarily that the Russians are, at least in private, claiming to represent a moral position, but they are claiming to represent a realist position. And they say that, in practice, that is what America does, as well, when its vital interests are threatened.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of a realist tradition, President Biden said — after the summit, he said, quote, “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.” And he was referring to Russia’s alleged interference in U.S. elections. Your reaction to President Biden’s statement?

ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, it’s not so much a question of my reaction. This kind of American statement causes hysterical laughter in Latin America, in large parts of Asia and, by the way, in Russia itself, where America brought very heavy influence to bear in the elections in the 1990s in support of Boris Yeltsin, who was America’s candidate, if you like. I mean, the suggestion that America has not interfered in other people’s elections, tried very hard to influence them, through every possible measure of propaganda and bribery, and, of course, in a good many instances, has supported coups to actually overturn those elections, as in Algeria, to take only one example, in 1992, or in Egypt, since then, in Chile, if you go back to the 1970s — I mean, this does indicate a kind of blissful lack of self-awareness on the part of President Biden, that, of course, really discredits him and America in the eyes of ordinary Russians, including many ordinary Russians who really dislike Putin and the Putin administration by now. You know, they are perfectly well aware of the corruption and the oppressiveness of that administration, but they regard this kind of lecture by the United States as just totally hypocritical.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Biden in his own words on this issue.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he has engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, the United States, as you just pointed out, has this long history of interfering. By one count from Carnegie-Mellon University professor Dov Levin, the U.S. interfered in 81 foreign presidential elections between 1946 and 2000, and that doesn’t include U.S.-backed coups and regime change. I wanted to go to the issue of — here is ABC reporter Rachel Scott questioning the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

RACHEL SCOTT: [The list of] your political opponents who are dead, prisoned or jailed is long. Alexei Navalny’s organization calls for free and fair elections, an end to corruption. But Russia has outlawed that organization, calling it extremist. And you have now prevented anyone who supports him to run for office. So, my question is, Mr. President: What are you so afraid of?

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] The United States has a law that spells out that the United States will support specific entities and organizations in Russia. At the same time, the Russian Federation was labeled as an adversary. They went on the record and said publicly that they will stymie the development of Russia. … We have labeled them as foreign agents, but we haven’t banned them. I mean, they can operate all right. If you’re labeled as a foreign agent, that does not preclude you from operating in the country. Well, if it’s an extremist organization, that’s a whole new story, whole different story. The organization in question publicly has called for riots and public disorder. It has openly instructed people on how to make Molotov cocktails.

AMY GOODMAN: So if you could address this issue of Alexei Navalny and what Biden said? And also, I mean, this was a summit between Biden and Putin, obviously president of Russia, where Ed Snowden is. He can’t come home to the United States for fear of being imprisoned for the rest of his life as a whistleblower. This is also the week, the 50th anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers and the celebration of whistleblower Dan Ellsberg. And you’ve got Julian Assange wasting away in a high-security British prison as the U.S. refuses, the Biden administration refuses, to drop extradition requests against him to bring him to the U.S., where he faces over 170 years in jail. Anatol Lieven?

ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, undoubtedly, Russia, under Putin, has become much more authoritarian. And yes, I mean, opposition parties have, in effect, been banned. And leading opposition figures have been murdered, although we don’t have definite proof of who was responsible, but, naturally, there must be serious suspicions.

Now, that is not something that happens in the United States, I’m very happy to say. But you’re quite right. The U.S. record is not spotless. And I was, frankly, astonished earlier this year when Belarus forced down a plane in order to arrest an opposition journalist, something which, by the way, I deeply condemn and oppose. But if we’re talking of Edward Snowden, of course, the United States and its NATO allies did exactly the same thing to the presidential plane of the president of Bolivia, forced it down in Vienna in order to search that plane for Edward Snowden.

So, you know, in issues like this, in issues of election interference in other countries, I mean, here, this really is a case of the kettle calling — the American kettle calling the Russian pot black. On the other hand, I am glad that Biden did issue this warning to Putin about Navalny, because, I mean, it is actually true. If Navalny dies in Russian custody, the impact on relations between Russia and Europe, as well as Russia and U.S.A., will indeed be appalling. So, it’s just as well to tell President Putin that.

AMY GOODMAN: I should add — I was just talking about whistleblowers who are dealing with the United States — that Daniel Hale, who is also a whistleblower, who released classified information on drones and targeted assassinations, faces sentencing in July. And Reality Winner has just been released from prison, after serving years there for her release of information, her family calling for her to be pardoned. She wasn’t released into freedom, but into a halfway house. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to go back for a second to Afghanistan, how little was dealt with in terms of Afghanistan at this meeting of Putin and Biden, given the enormous impact that wars in Afghanistan have had in both countries. Obviously, Russia spent 10 years bogged down in a war — occupation and a war in Afghanistan against jihadist guerrillas, and ultimately was defeated and had to leave. And the United States has spent more than 20 years — 20 years now in Afghanistan. I’m wondering your sense of whether both leaders were, in essence, trying to avoid the issue.

ANATOL LIEVEN: I’m afraid it may be even worse than that. I think that there is by now a profound American lack of interest in Afghanistan. You know, to a considerable extent, the American establishment has given up on the place and is just anxious to get out and hopes that it will hold together for, if you remember the phrase, a “decent interval,” so that when it eventually collapses, people will not so much blame the United States or see it as an American defeat.

But, I mean, what it also illustrates, I think, is this tendency in Washington to believe that America must not just be involved in, but must lead every important process in every part of the world. And if America is not going to be there, it loses interest, and certainly has very little interest in coordinating regional countries.

Because, of course, the point is that America — we always knew that America would go home, sooner or later — I mean, we hoped, with better success than it has done in Afghanistan. But, you know, America lives — what? Seven thousand miles from Afghanistan? Russia is very close to Afghanistan. China, Iran, Pakistan are actually on Afghanistan’s borders. They will always be concerned with what happens in Afghanistan. They also have the same interests as the United States in combating ISIS and international Islamist terrorism, as does India. And they all fare the consequences of a new outright civil war in Afghanistan.

So, this was a real opportunity for America, through Russia, to talk to the region about coordinating future approaches, because without a regional consensus on Afghanistan, I am afraid that there will be no possibility of peace there in the future.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of Ukraine, again, this is a red-line issue in terms of Russia and the possibility of Ukraine entering NATO. What’s your expectation of how this will develop, whether NATO will keep trying to recruit Ukraine?

ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, it was very interesting, you know, yesterday — or was it the day before now? President Zelensky of Ukraine issued a tweet claiming that Biden had extended an immediate offer of NATO membership. That, of course, was not true. And it was an attempt, quite obviously, to trap the Biden administration into making this offer. Apparently, that was the reason why Biden’s first press conference in Geneva was delayed by two-and-a-half hours, while the U.S. administration or the Biden team formulated a response, which, once again, talked about the possibility in future of NATO membership for Ukraine remaining open, but made absolutely no actual commitment to that for the foreseeable future, because there are two basic facts which must be acknowledged.

The first is that NATO will not take Ukraine in as long as it has ongoing military conflicts with Russia, because that would point directly towards NATO having to go to war with Russia over the Donbas and Crimea. And, I mean, the very thought of that is ridiculous, you know, to risk nuclear war for separatist provinces of Ukraine. And in any case, any move in that direction would be vetoed by half a dozen European NATO members.

The second point to bring out is that the West will not fight for Ukraine. We didn’t fight for Georgia in 2008, despite many semi-promises. We didn’t fight for Ukraine in 2014. Despite this very loose and sloppy use of the word “alliance,” Ukraine is not an ally. It will not be saved by the West in a war with Russia.

So, I think the whole issue of NATO membership for Ukraine has become, frankly, empty and theoretical. This is a can which will be endlessly kicked down the road — continuing, by the way, to alarm and irritate the Russians, but not actually leading to anything in practical terms.

AMY GOODMAN: Can we talk about a subject that really wasn’t so much in the news yesterday, which was China? You have China’s military sending 28 warplanes to airspace controlled by Taiwan Tuesday — a record number since it began flying these sorties on a daily basis. In response, Taiwan scrambled jet fighters, activated defense systems, the tensions coming just a day [after] Biden successfully pushed NATO leaders to declare China to be a security risk for the first time. And behind the scenes, you have Europe pushing back on the United States, that although Biden said he doesn’t want to have a new Cold War with Russia, looks like he’s pushing for a Cold War with Russia and China. Talk about the country that wasn’t included in this summit.

ANATOL LIEVEN: Yes. Well, from a realist point of view, America, for the past 20 years, has violated fundamental principle of realism 101 — as, by the way, Henry Kissinger, the arch-realist, has discretely, diplomatically pointed out. It has driven its two main adversaries together instead of separating them. And instead of, as it did — you know, Kissinger and Nixon in the 1970s took China, the weaker communist state, and turned it against the Soviet Union, the stronger one. There would be many opportunities to take Russia and, if not turn it against China, at least keep it away from China. But that obviously is not going to happen as long as the United States and West extends NATO up to Russia’s borders. Russia is bound to see that as the principal threat.

The result is that Russia has been driven closer and closer to China, in a way, by the way, that makes a good many Russians, in private, pretty anxious — you know, this fear that, in future, Russia will simply be a kind of dependency of China. But as far as they can see, there’s not much they can do about it, given U.S. policy towards Russia.

I mean, on these NATO statements of China being an adversary, the European Union is much more important, because it’s a question of economic pushback against aspects of Chinese policy, against China buying up infrastructure, against China trying to dominate aspects of international communications, Huawei 5G. Now, there, the European Union actually does play a critical role, alongside the United States. And that’s why, of course, the Biden administration has devoted so much attention to getting the European Union onside.

But NATO, frankly, given its miserable performance in Afghanistan, and given that, Britain aside, the actual NATO offer of forces to sort of, if you like, side with America in the Indo-Pacific, amounts, to date, to one warship, one frigate or destroyer, at a time, that isn’t going to worry the Chinese. You know, NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s the ultimate backstop against Russian aggression into Western or Central Europe. But every attempt to extend NATO out of area has proved a failure. It’s just not configured for that. And one of the reasons it’s not configured for that is that most of the European countries — once again, exception of Britain and France — simply will not fight. You know, they won’t fight, in any circumstances, seriously. They are there to defend Western Europe. And in the unbelievable scenario that Western Europe was invaded, they would fight to defend their homelands. But you’re not going to get them to deploy seriously against China. It’s a nonissue.

AMY GOODMAN: Anatol Lieven, I want to thank you for being with us, senior fellow for Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, author of many books on Russia and the former Soviet republics, his forthcoming book, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World.

NATO: the most dangerous military alliance on the planet: The massive expansion of NATO presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust
by Chris Hedges
July 14, 2022


“Together We Are Wrong.” Illustration by Mr. Fish.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into eastern and central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in eastern and central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes—including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use—in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.

“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. US and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in US and UK elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.

One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the US, coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.

Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside US control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the US.

China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the US’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent—its highest since 1984—but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the US. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the US’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the US to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and US strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do US bidding will be installed in Moscow.

NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.

China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the US and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.

NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the US sends naval ships through the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in eastern and central Europe. The US is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of US nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what US strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”

The US military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.

“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to the New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.

“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” the New York Times reported.

The longer the war in Ukraine continues—and the US and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years—the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim US global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” (2015) “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His latest book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the website ScheerPost.

The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine: A Hidden History of Diplomacy That Came Up Short—but Holds Lessons for Future Negotiations
by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko
Foreign Affairs
April 16, 2024
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ ... ar-ukraine


Russian and Ukrainian negotiators meeting via videoconference in March 2022. Photo posted to Telegram on March 14, 2022 by Vladimir Medinsky / Illustration by Foreign Affairs

SAMUEL CHARAP is Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation.

SERGEY RADCHENKO is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Europe.

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, the Russian air force struck targets across Ukraine. At the same time, Moscow’s infantry and armor poured into the country from the north, east, and south. In the days that followed, the Russians attempted to encircle Kyiv.

These were the first days and weeks of an invasion that could well have resulted in Ukraine’s defeat and subjugation by Russia. In retrospect, it seems almost miraculous that it did not.

What happened on the battlefield is relatively well understood. What is less understood is the simultaneous intense diplomacy involving Moscow, Kyiv, and a host of other actors, which could have resulted in a settlement just weeks after the war began.

By the end of March 2022, a series of in-person meetings in Belarus and Turkey and virtual engagements over video conference had produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, which described a framework for a settlement. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators then began working on the text of a treaty, making substantial progress toward an agreement. But in May, the talks broke off. The war raged on and has since cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

What happened? How close were the parties to ending the war? And why did they never finalize a deal?

To shed light on this often overlooked but critical episode in the war, we have examined draft agreements exchanged between the two sides, some details of which have not been reported previously. We have also conducted interviews with several participants in the talks as well as with officials serving at the time in key Western governments, to whom we have granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters. And we have reviewed numerous contemporaneous and more recent interviews with and statements by Ukrainian and Russian officials who were serving at the time of the talks. Most of these are available on YouTube but are not in English and thus not widely known in the West. Finally, we scrutinized the timeline of events from the start of the invasion through the end of May, when talks broke down. When we put all these pieces together, what we found is surprising—and could have significant implications for future diplomatic efforts to end the war.

In the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement.

Some observers and officials (including, most prominently, Russian President Vladimir Putin) have claimed that there was a deal on the table that would have ended the war but that the Ukrainians walked away from it because of a combination of pressure from their Western patrons and Kyiv’s own hubristic assumptions about Russian military weakness. Others have dismissed the significance of the talks entirely, claiming that the parties were merely going through the motions and buying time for battlefield realignments or that the draft agreements were unserious.

Although those interpretations contain kernels of truth, they obscure more than they illuminate. There was no single smoking gun; this story defies simple explanations. Further, such monocausal accounts elide completely a fact that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary: in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.

A final agreement proved elusive, however, for a number of reasons. Kyiv’s Western partners were reluctant to be drawn into a negotiation with Russia, particularly one that would have created new commitments for them to ensure Ukraine’s security. The public mood in Ukraine hardened with the discovery of Russian atrocities at Irpin and Bucha. And with the failure of Russia’s encirclement of Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky became more confident that, with sufficient Western support, he could win the war on the battlefield. Finally, although the parties’ attempt to resolve long-standing disputes over the security architecture offered the prospect of a lasting resolution to the war and enduring regional stability, they aimed too high, too soon. They tried to deliver an overarching settlement even as a basic cease-fire proved out of reach.

Today, when the prospects for negotiations appear dim and relations between the parties are nearly nonexistent, the history of the spring 2022 talks might seem like a distraction with little insight directly applicable to present circumstances. But Putin and Zelensky surprised everyone with their mutual willingness to consider far-reaching concessions to end the war. They might well surprise everyone again in the future.

ASSURANCE OR GUARANTEE?]

What did the Russians want to accomplish by invading Ukraine? On February 24, 2022, Putin gave a speech in which he justified the invasion by mentioning the vague goal of “denazification” of the country. The most reasonable interpretation of “denazification” was that Putin sought to topple the government in Kyiv, possibly killing or capturing Zelensky in the process.

Yet days after the invasion began, Moscow began probing to find grounds for a compromise. A war Putin expected to be a cakewalk was already proving anything but, and this early openness to talking suggests he appears to have already abandoned the idea of outright regime change. Zelensky, as he had before the war, voiced an immediate interest in a personal meeting with Putin. Though he refused to talk directly with Zelensky, Putin did appoint a negotiating team. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko played the part of mediator.

The talks began on February 28 at one of Lukashenko’s spacious countryside residences near the village of Liaskavichy, about 30 miles from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian delegation was headed by Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s political party, and included Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, and other senior officials. The Russian delegation was led by Vladimir Medinsky, a senior adviser to the Russian president who had earlier served as culture minister. It also included deputy ministers of defense and foreign affairs, among others.

At the first meeting, the Russians presented a set of harsh conditions, effectively demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. This was a nonstarter. But as Moscow’s position on the battlefield continued to deteriorate, its positions at the negotiating table became less demanding. So on March 3 and March 7, the parties held a second and third round of talks, this time in Kamyanyuki, Belarus, just across the border from Poland. The Ukrainian delegation presented demands of their own: an immediate cease-fire and the establishment of humanitarian corridors that would allow civilians to safely leave the war zone. It was during the third round of talks that the Russians and the Ukrainians appear to have examined drafts for the first time. According to Medinsky, these were Russian drafts, which Medinsky’s delegation brought from Moscow and which probably reflected Moscow’s insistence on Ukraine’s neutral status.

At this point, in-person meetings broke up for nearly three weeks, although the delegations continued to meet via Zoom. In those exchanges, the Ukrainians began to focus on the issue that would become central to their vision of the endgame for the war: security guarantees that would oblige other states to come to Ukraine’s defense if Russia attacked again in the future. It is not entirely clear when Kyiv first raised this issue in conversations with the Russians or Western countries. But on March 10, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, then in Antalya, Turkey, for a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, spoke of a “systematic, sustainable solution” for Ukraine, adding that the Ukrainians were “ready to discuss” guarantees it hoped to receive from NATO member states and Russia.


Podolyak and Ukrainian Ambassador to Turkey Vasyl Bodnar after a meeting with the Russians, Istanbul, March 2022. Kemal Aslan / Reuters

What Kuleba seemed to have in mind was a multilateral security guarantee, an arrangement whereby competing powers commit to the security of a third state, usually on the condition that it will remain unaligned with any of the guarantors. Such agreements had mostly fallen out of favor after the Cold War. Whereas alliances such as NATO intend to maintain collective defense against a common enemy, multilateral security guarantees are designed to prevent conflict among the guarantors over the alignment of the guaranteed state, and by extension to ensure that state’s security.

Ukraine had a bitter experience with a less ironclad version of this sort of agreement: a multilateral security assurance, as opposed to a guarantee. In 1994, it signed on to the so-called Budapest Memorandum, joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear weapons state and agreeing to give up what was then the world’s third-largest arsenal. In return, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States promised that they would not attack Ukraine. Yet contrary to a widespread misconception, in the event of aggression against Ukraine, the agreement required the signatories only to call a UN Security Council meeting, not to come to the country’s defense.

Russia’s full-scale invasion—and the cold reality that Ukraine was fighting an existential war on its own—drove Kyiv to find a way to both end the aggression and ensure it never happened again. On March 14, just as the two delegations were meeting via Zoom, Zelensky posted a message on his Telegram channel calling for “normal, effective security guarantees” that would not be “like the Budapest ones.” In an interview with Ukrainian journalists two days later, his adviser Podolyak explained that what Kyiv sought were “absolute security guarantees” that would require that “the signatories . . . do not stand aside in the event of an attack on Ukraine, as is the case now. Instead, they [would] take an active part in defending Ukraine in a conflict.”

Ukraine’s demand not to be left to fend for itself again is completely understandable. Kyiv wanted (and still wants) to have a more reliable mechanism than Russia’s goodwill for its future security. But getting a guarantee would be difficult. Naftali Bennett was the Israeli prime minister at the time the talks were happening and was actively mediating between the two sides. In an interview with journalist Hanoch Daum posted online in February 2023, he recalled that he attempted to dissuade Zelensky from getting stuck on the question of security guarantees. “There is this joke about a guy trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a passerby,” Bennett explained. “I said: ‘America will give you guarantees? It will commit that in several years if Russia violates something, it will send soldiers? After leaving Afghanistan and all that?’ I said: ‘Volodymyr, it won’t happen.’”

To put a finer point on it: if the United States and its allies were unwilling to provide Ukraine such guarantees (for example, in the form of NATO membership) before the war, why would they do so after Russia had so vividly demonstrated its willingness to attack Ukraine? The Ukrainian negotiators developed an answer to this question, but in the end, it didn’t persuade their risk-averse Western colleagues. Kyiv’s position was that, as the emerging guarantees concept implied, Russia would be a guarantor, too, which would mean Moscow essentially agreed that the other guarantors would be obliged to intervene if it attacked again. In other words, if Moscow accepted that any future aggression against Ukraine would mean a war between Russia and the United States, it would be no more inclined to attack Ukraine again than it would be to attack a NATO ally.

A BREAKTHROUGH

Throughout March, heavy fighting continued on all fronts. The Russians attempted to take Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy but failed spectacularly, although all three cities sustained heavy damage. By mid-March, the Russian army’s thrust toward Kyiv had stalled, and it was taking heavy casualties. The two delegations kept up talks over videoconference but returned to meeting in person on March 29, this time in Istanbul, Turkey.

There, they appeared to have achieved a breakthrough. After the meeting, the sides announced they had agreed to a joint communiqué. The terms were broadly described during the two sides’ press statements in Istanbul. But we have obtained a copy of the full text of the draft communiqué, titled “Key Provisions of the Treaty on Ukraine’s Security Guarantees.” According to participants we interviewed, the Ukrainians had largely drafted the communiqué and the Russians provisionally accepted the idea of using it as the framework for a treaty.

The treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state. Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil. The communiqué listed as possible guarantors the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia) along with Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, and Turkey.

The communiqué also said that if Ukraine came under attack and requested assistance, all guarantor states would be obliged, following consultations with Ukraine and among themselves, to provide assistance to Ukraine to restore its security. Remarkably, these obligations were spelled out with much greater precision than NATO’s Article 5: imposing a no-fly zone, supplying weapons, or directly intervening with the guarantor state’s own military force.

The Istanbul Communiqué called for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next 15 years.

Although Ukraine would be permanently neutral under the proposed framework, Kyiv’s path to EU membership would be left open, and the guarantor states (including Russia) would explicitly “confirm their intention to facilitate Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.” This was nothing short of extraordinary: in 2013, Putin had put intense pressure on Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to back out of a mere association agreement with the EU. Now, Russia was agreeing to “facilitate” Ukraine’s full accession to the EU.

Although Ukraine’s interest in obtaining these security guarantees is clear, it is not obvious why Russia would agree to any of this. Just weeks earlier, Putin had attempted to seize Ukraine’s capital, oust its government, and impose a puppet regime. It seems far-fetched that he suddenly decided to accept that Ukraine—which was now more hostile to Russia than ever, thanks to Putin’s own actions—would become a member of the EU and have its independence and security guaranteed by the United States (among others). And yet the communiqué suggests that was precisely what Putin was willing to accept.

We can only conjecture as to why. Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed; that was clear by early March. Perhaps he was now willing to cut his losses if he got his longest-standing demand: that Ukraine renounce its NATO aspirations and never host NATO forces on its territory. If he could not control the entire country, at least he could ensure his most basic security interests, stem the hemorrhaging of Russia’s economy, and restore the country’s international reputation.

The communiqué also includes another provision that is stunning, in retrospect: it calls for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next ten to 15 years. Since Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, Moscow has never agreed to discuss its status, claiming that it was a region of Russia no different than any other. By offering to negotiate over its status, the Kremlin had tacitly admitted that was not the case.

FIGHTING AND TALKING

In remarks he made on March 29, immediately after the conclusion of the talks, Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, sounded decidedly upbeat, explaining that the discussions of the treaty on Ukraine’s neutrality were entering the practical phase and that—allowing for all the complexities presented by the treaty’s having many potential guarantors—it was possible that Putin and Zelensky would sign it at a summit in the foreseeable future.

The next day, he told reporters, “Yesterday, the Ukrainian side, for the first time fixed in a written form its readiness to carry out a series of most important conditions for the building of future normal and good-neighborly relations with Russia.” He continued, “They handed to us the principles of a potential future settlement, fixed in writing.”

Meanwhile, Russia had abandoned its efforts to take Kyiv and was pulling back its forces from the entire northern front. Alexander Fomin, Russia’s deputy minister of defense, had announced the decision in Istanbul on March 29, calling it an effort “to build mutual trust.” In fact, the withdrawal was a forced retreat. The Russians had overestimated their capabilities and underestimated the Ukrainian resistance and were now spinning their failure as a gracious diplomatic measure to facilitate peace talks.

Even after reports from Bucha made headlines in April 2022, the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty.

The withdrawal had far-reaching consequences. It stiffened Zelensky’s resolve, removing an immediate threat to his government, and demonstrated that Putin’s vaunted military machine could be pushed back, if not defeated, on the battlefield. It also enabled large-scale Western military assistance to Ukraine by freeing up the lines of communication leading to Kyiv. Finally, the retreat set the stage for the gruesome discovery of atrocities that Russian forces had committed in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where they had raped, mutilated, and murdered civilians.

Reports from Bucha began to make headlines in early April. On April 4, Zelensky visited the town. The next day, he spoke to the UN Security Council via video and accused Russia of perpetrating war crimes in Bucha, comparing Russian forces to the Islamic State terrorist group (also known as ISIS). Zelensky called for the UN Security Council to expel Russia, a permanent member.

Remarkably, however, the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty that Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sign during a summit to be held in the not-too-distant future.

The sides were actively exchanging drafts with each other and, it appears, beginning to share them with other parties. (In his February 2023 interview, Bennett reported seeing 17 or 18 working drafts of the agreement; Lukashenko also reported seeing at least one.) We have closely scrutinized two of these drafts, one that is dated April 12 and another dated April 15, which participants in the talks told us was the last one exchanged between the parties. They are broadly similar but contain important differences—and both show that the communiqué had not resolved some key issues.


Excerpt of a draft Russian-Ukrainian treaty dated April 15, 2022

First, whereas the communiqué and the April 12 draft made clear that guarantor states would decide independently whether to come to Kyiv’s aid in the event of an attack on Ukraine, in the April 15 draft, the Russians attempted to subvert this crucial article by insisting that such action would occur only “on the basis of a decision agreed to by all guarantor states”—giving the likely invader, Russia, a veto. According to a notation on the text, the Ukrainians rejected that amendment, insisting on the original formula, under which all the guarantors had an individual obligation to act and would not have to reach consensus before doing so.


Excerpt of a draft Russian-Ukrainian treaty dated April 15, 2022. Red text in italics represents Russian positions not accepted by the Ukrainian side; red text in bold represents Ukrainian positions not accepted by the Russian side.

Second, the drafts contain several articles that were added to the treaty at Russia’s insistence but were not part of the communiqué and related to matters that Ukraine refused to discuss. These require Ukraine to ban “fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, and aggressive nationalism”—and, to that end, to repeal six Ukrainian laws (fully or in part) that dealt, broadly, with contentious aspects of Soviet-era history, in particular the role of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.

It is easy to see why Ukraine would resist letting Russia determine its policies on historical memory, particularly in the context of a treaty on security guarantees. And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.

It is also possible, however, that the provisions were intended to allow Putin to save face. For example, by forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of “denazification,” even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government.

In the end, it remains unclear whether these provisions would have been a deal-breaker. The lead Ukrainian negotiator, Arakhamia, later downplayed their importance. As he put it in a November 2023 interview on a Ukrainian television news program, Russia had “hoped until the last moment that they [could] squeeze us to sign such an agreement, that we [would] adopt neutrality. This was the biggest thing for them. They were ready to finish the war if we, like Finland [during the Cold War], adopted neutrality and undertook not to join NATO.”

The talks had deliberately skirted the question of borders and territory.

The size and the structure of the Ukrainian military was also the subject of intense negotiation. As of April 15, the two sides remained quite far apart on the matter. The Ukrainians wanted a peacetime army of 250,000 people; the Russians insisted on a maximum of 85,000, considerably smaller than the standing army Ukraine had before the invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians wanted 800 tanks; the Russians would allow only 342. The difference between the range of missiles was even starker: 280 kilometers, or about 174 miles, (the Ukrainian position), and a mere 40 kilometers, or about 25 miles, (the Russian position).

The talks had deliberately skirted the question of borders and territory. Evidently, the idea was for Putin and Zelensky to decide on those issues at the planned summit. It is easy to imagine that Putin would have insisted on holding all the territory that his forces had already occupied. The question is whether Zelensky could have been convinced to agree to this land grab.

Despite these substantial disagreements, the April 15 draft suggests that the treaty would be signed within two weeks. Granted, that date might have shifted, but it shows that the two teams planned to move fast. “We were very close in mid-April 2022 to finalizing the war with a peace settlement,” one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Oleksandr Chalyi, recounted at a public appearance in December 2023. “[A] week after Putin started his aggression, he concluded he had made a huge mistake and tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine.”

WHAT HAPPENED?

So why did the talks break off? Putin has claimed that Western powers intervened and spiked the deal because they were more interested in weakening Russia than in ending the war. He alleged that Boris Johnson, who was then the British prime minister, had delivered the message to the Ukrainians, on behalf of “the Anglo-Saxon world,” that they must “fight Russia until victory is achieved and Russia suffers a strategic defeat.”

The Western response to these negotiations, while a far cry from Putin’s caricature, was certainly lukewarm. Washington and its allies were deeply skeptical about the prospects for the diplomatic track emerging from Istanbul; after all, the communiqué sidestepped the question of territory and borders, and the parties remained far apart on other crucial issues. It did not seem to them like a negotiation that was going to succeed.

Moreover, a former U.S. official who worked on Ukraine policy at the time told us that the Ukrainians did not consult with Washington until after the communiqué had been issued, even though the treaty it described would have created new legal commitments for the United States—including an obligation to go to war with Russia if it invaded Ukraine again. That stipulation alone would have made the treaty a nonstarter for Washington. So instead of embracing the Istanbul communiqué and the subsequent diplomatic process, the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia, including through an ever-tightening sanctions regime.

The United Kingdom took the lead. Already on March 30, Johnson seemed disinclined toward diplomacy, stating that instead “we should continue to intensify sanctions with a rolling program until every single one of [Putin’s] troops is out of Ukraine.” On April 9, Johnson turned up in Kyiv —the first foreign leader to visit after the Russian withdrawal from the capital. He reportedly told Zelensky that he thought that “any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” Any deal, he recalled saying, “would be some victory for him: if you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.” In the 2023 interview, Arakhamia ruffled some feathers by seeming to hold Johnson responsible for the outcome. “When we returned from Istanbul,” he said, “Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we won’t sign anything at all with [the Russians]—and let’s just keep fighting.”

Since then, Putin has repeatedly used Arakhamia’s remarks to blame the West for the collapse of the talks and demonstrate Ukraine’s subordination to its supporters. Notwithstanding Putin’s manipulative spin, Arakhamia was pointing to a real problem: the communiqué described a multilateral framework that would require Western willingness to engage diplomatically with Russia and consider a genuine security guarantee for Ukraine. Neither was a priority for the United States and its allies at the time.

Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war.

In their public remarks, the Americans were never quite so dismissive of diplomacy as Johnson had been. But they did not appear to consider it central to their response to Russia’s invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv two weeks after Johnson, mostly to coordinate greater military support. As Blinken put it at a press conference afterward, “The strategy that we’ve put in place—massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts—is having real results.”

Still, the claim that the West forced Ukraine to back out of the talks with Russia is baseless. It suggests that Kyiv had no say in the matter. True, the West’s offers of support must have strengthened Zelensky’s resolve, and the lack of Western enthusiasm does seem to have dampened his interest in diplomacy. Ultimately, however, in his discussions with Western leaders, Zelensky did not prioritize the pursuit of diplomacy with Russia to end the war. Neither the United States nor its allies perceived a strong demand from him for them to engage on the diplomatic track. At the time, given the outpouring of public sympathy in the West, such a push could well have affected Western policy.

Zelensky was also unquestionably outraged by the Russian atrocities at Bucha and Irpin, and he probably understood that what he began to refer to as Russia’s “genocide” in Ukraine would make diplomacy with Moscow even more politically fraught. Still, the behind-the-scenes work on the draft treaty continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.

The Ukrainians’ newfound confidence that they could win the war also clearly played a role. The Russian retreat from Kyiv and other major cities in the northeast and the prospect of more weapons from the West (with roads into Kyiv now under Ukrainian control) changed the military balance. Optimism about possible gains on the battlefield often reduces a belligerent’s interest in making compromises at the negotiating table.

Indeed, by late April, Ukraine had hardened its position, demanding a Russian withdrawal from the Donbas as a precondition to any treaty. As Oleksii Danilov, the chair of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, put it on May 2: “A treaty with Russia is impossible—only capitulation can be accepted.”


Russian and Ukrainian negotiators meeting in Istanbul, March 2022. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service / Reuters.

And then there is the Russian side of the story, which is difficult to assess. Was the whole negotiation a well-orchestrated charade, or was Moscow seriously interested in a settlement? Did Putin get cold feet when he understood that the West would not sign on to the accords or that the Ukrainian position had hardened?

Even if Russia and Ukraine had overcome their disagreements, the framework they negotiated in Istanbul would have required buy-in from the United States and its allies. And those Western powers would have needed to take a political risk by engaging in negotiations with Russia and Ukraine and to put their credibility on the line by guaranteeing Ukraine’s security. At the time, and in the intervening two years, the willingness either to undertake high-stakes diplomacy or to truly commit to come to Ukraine’s defense in the future has been notably absent in Washington and European capitals.

A final reason the talks failed is that the negotiators put the cart of a postwar security order before the horse of ending the war. The two sides skipped over essential matters of conflict management and mitigation (the creation of humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire, troop withdrawals) and instead tried to craft something like a long-term peace treaty that would resolve security disputes that had been the source of geopolitical tensions for decades. It was an admirably ambitious effort—but it proved too ambitious.

To be fair, Russia, Ukraine, and the West had tried it the other way around—and also failed miserably. The Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas covered minutiae such as the date and time of the cessation of hostilities and which weapons system should be withdrawn by what distance. Both sides’ core security concerns were addressed indirectly, if at all.

This history suggests that future talks should move forward on parallel tracks, with the practicalities of ending the war being addressed on one track while broader issues are covered in another.

KEEP IT IN MIND

On April 11, 2024, Lukashenko, the early middleman of the Russian-Ukrainian peace talks, called for a return to the draft treaty from spring 2022. “It’s a reasonable position,” he said in a conversation with Putin in the Kremlin. “It was an acceptable position for Ukraine, too. They agreed to this position.”

Putin chimed in. “They agreed, of course,” he said.

In reality, however, the Russians and the Ukrainians never arrived at a final compromise text. But they went further in that direction than has been previously understood, reaching an overarching framework for a possible agreement.

After the past two years of carnage, all this may be so much water under the bridge. But it is a reminder that Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war. So if and when Kyiv and Moscow return to the negotiating table, they’ll find it littered with ideas that could yet prove useful in building a durable peace.

10 years since the far-right coup in Kiev
by A Ukrainian socialist
28 February 2024
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/0 ... f-f29.html

This article was written by a Ukrainian socialist living abroad.

Last week, Volodymyr Zelensky’s authoritarian regime celebrated the anniversary of the far-right coup in Kiev against the backdrop of the horrific consequences the 2014 coup had for Ukraine’s multi-millioned population and humanity as a whole.

That coup and the ensuing war, which has already cost hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, were deliberately instigated by American and German imperialism with the goal of bringing a puppet regime to power that would be willing to hand Ukraine over to their direct control.


Line of protesters at Dynamivska Str. Euromaidan Protests. Events of Jan 20, 2014 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The conspirators in Washington and Berlin enlisted the support of opposition parties to the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych, one of which was the neo-fascist Svoboda Party, which openly support the actions of Nazi collaborators from Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Following the coup, Svoboda became the first neo-fascist party to enter a government in Europe since the end of World War II.

The imperialists were fully conscious that the coup they were preparing would lead to a military escalation with Russia. They did not try to avoid it at all, but on the contrary, they believed that such a military escalation was necessary to achieve their goals.

And after the coup, which provoked the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the civil war in Donbass, in which 3,400 people were killed between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine has been armed to the teeth by NATO with yearly training exercises.

The United States and NATO have also systematically armed and trained Ukrainian forces and far-right formations first under the Poroshenko and then Zelensky regime. Even in the lead up to the open war that broke out in 2022, the imperialist powers and the Kiev government worked closely with neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Battalion to wage an indirect war against Russia in East Ukraine.

All these facts put the last nail in the coffin of US propaganda about a sudden and unexpected, “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s regime in February 2022.

Although Putin’s invasion was a desperate response to NATO expansion, this does neither justify the actions of the Putin regime nor change its reactionary character. Just as the Zelensky regime speaks for the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchy, the Putin regime speaks for the interests of the Russian oligarchy. Both emerged out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s destruction of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism and are deeply hostile to the working class.

Immediately following the coup, the working class of Ukraine faced attacks on its social and democratic rights. Arson attacks on party headquarters, physical violence against party members began and parties were banned. The new regime daily restricted the right to express dissent and to assemble peacefully without fear of fascist attack. Prices, inequality and poverty increased exponentially. The policies pursued by the Poroshenko regime and now the Zelensky government have benefited the oligarchy, exacerbating inequality and pushing more and more working class people into abject poverty.


The Trade Union house in Odessa after a fire and imperialist-backed massacre by Ukrainian fascists in 2014. [Photo by Lsimon / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

The coup d’état also entailed intensified efforts by the state to rehabilitate the World War II-era fascists from the OUN and its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The Communist Party and communist symbols were banned, while fascist forces were rehabilitated and their crimes glorified or minimized. The new regime began to distort historical facts and remake textbooks for its own purposes. It renamed streets and destroyed monuments, including those of many leaders of the October Revolution and the Trotskyist Left Opposition to Stalinism that hailed from Ukraine.

Among the monuments destroyed was one of the Bolshevik Vitaly Primakov, the adopted son of the famous Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Primakov was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee that organized the October insurrection in 1917, became commander of the Ukrainian Red Cossacks during the civil war and later a member of the Left Opposition.

Monuments and streets, dedicated to Yevgeniia Bosh, a leader of the Bolshevik Party and member of the Left Opposition in Ukraine, as well as of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, participant in the October armed uprising in Petrograd, and Soviet military commander who signed the Declaration of the 46, were renamed or demolished. A bust of the famous German revolutionary and anti-militarist Karl Liebknecht was also destroyed.


Monument to Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, a leader of the October Revolution and signatory of the Declaration of 46, in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv (Chernigov) before its demolition in 2015. [Photo: Mixabest ]

At the same time, a wave of attacks was unleashed on the historical truth about the victory of the Soviet people over Nazi Germany in World War II. The government systematically tried to present the Red Army in the eyes of the Ukrainian people not as liberators but as occupiers of Ukraine. And this despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population has ancestors who fought in the ranks of the Red Army against fascism!

With the beginning of the war in February 2022, the government began to destroy monuments to Soviet soldiers all over western Ukraine, destroying their burial places and the burial places of victims of the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.

All this was aimed at undermining the collective memory, the memory of the working class, at suppressing the history and truth about the achievements of the October Revolution and the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism.

It is in this history that one must look for the roots of the events of 2014 and the war in Ukraine. All these events can only be understood as the direct result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which led to the creation of bourgeois Ukraine.

The restoration of capitalism was the culmination of Stalin’s betrayal of the internationalist program of the 1917 October Revolution. In Ukraine, this nationalist reaction formed the basis for the policy of forced collectivization and the ensuing famine that killed millions of people, and the perversion of the Bolshevik national policy which suppressed Ukrainian cultural and national aspirations and undermined the unity of the peoples within the Soviet Union.

With the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, bourgeois nationalists began to raise their heads, including in Ukraine. In September 1989, the “People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika” was formed, which was engaged in fomenting national discord between the Russian and Ukrainian working classes and called for separatism. On the territory of western Ukraine, bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists began not only dismantling monuments to Lenin and Soviet soldiers. Under the guise of fighting Stalinism, they also rehabilitated the fascist collaborators and murderers of women, old men and children from the OUN-UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army). They glorified them by building monuments to Bandera and naming streets after him. It was then that the harassment and attacks on workers of Russian nationality and on communists and members of the Komsomol (the youth organization of the Communist Party) began.

Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists everywhere engaged in this harassment, using force not only against ethnic Russians but also the Russian language, forcing many to leave the cities of western Ukraine.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, what had started in the 1980s gained even more momentum, especially under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power after the US-backed “orange revolution” of 2004. His government not only promoted the glorification of fascists but also gave Nazi collaborators such as Roman Shukhevych the title of “heroes of Ukraine.”


The government brought to power by the 2004 Western imperialist-sponsored Orange Revolution and led by Viktor Yushchenko aggressively sought to promote the OUN fascists. In 2007 the Ukrainian postal service issued a stamp honoring Nazi war criminal and UPA leader Roman Shukhevych.

But no matter how strong the machine of propaganda and historical falsification is, the proletariat of Ukraine will sooner or later break it, winning not only the struggle for historical truth but also in the struggle against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and those whom it serves.

Already, every day the numbers of those who do not agree with this war are growing, who realize that its root causes are the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ultra-right February coup in Kiev and NATO expansion. There are more and more of those who are waking up from the decade-long stupor. Among them are not only the Ukrainian workers who were destined by Zelensky’s authoritarian regime to be nothing more than cannon fodder but also those who are already in the war. They are looking at the government in Kiev and are realizing what fate is in store for them. Already facing injustice, they are beginning to think about what they are fighting and dying for.

Some of them still think that once they win this war, they will go and overthrow the government that sent them to war. Others are already prepared to desert the battlefield or to turn their guns on “their” regime. And this mood exists not only in the Ukrainian working class but also in the Russian working class, which is, ultimately, in the same situation as the Ukrainian working class.

Sooner or later, this war will lead to a popular explosion. However, without an independent workers’ party and a revolutionary leadership, the Ukrainian and Russian working class cannot win. Above all, it cannot win without returning to the internationalist traditions of the great October proletarian revolution. The revival of these traditions can only be achieved through a fight for orthodox Trotskyism, which is the Marxism of the 21st century, and embodies Bolshevik traditions. That is why socialist-minded workers and young people who are opposed to this war must fight for the building of the Ukrainian and Russian sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International!

75 years of NATO: From Cold War to hot war
by Peter Schwarz
wwsws.org
5 April 2024
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/0 ... s-a06.html

On April 4, the NATO military alliance marked its 75th anniversary. NATO was founded in 1949 less than four years after the end of World War II, in the initial years of the Cold War, as an alliance aimed against the Soviet Union. Today, it is plunging mankind into a Third World War.

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A general view of the round table meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, April 4, 2024. [AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert]

The anniversary was marked by a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels that was devoted to a major new escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine. Only a few weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron proposed to send ground troops to Ukraine to fight Russian forces, NATO is preparing to take over the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that coordinates aid to Ukraine. Ukraine’s war against Russia is emerging as an operation commanded by NATO.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said NATO support for Ukraine was “rock solid” and vowed, “Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland—Annalena Baerbock, Stéphane Séjourné and Radosław Sikorski—stated in Politico that NATO powers have given Ukraine over €200 billion. They pledged: “Our support will continue for as long as it takes and as intensively as needed.”

The NATO powers are presently backing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, which has killed over 40,000 people. This is seen as part of an expanding global war.

“We know that our security is not regional—it is global,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in his anniversary remarks. “The war in Ukraine illustrates this clearly. Russia’s friends in Asia are vital for continuing its war of aggression. China is propping up Russia’s war economy. In return, Moscow is mortgaging its future to Beijing. North Korea and Iran are delivering substantial supplies of weapons and ammunition. In return, Pyongyang and Tehran are receiving Russian technology and supplies that help them advance their missile and nuclear capabilities.”

The claim that NATO serves the “defence” and “security” of Europe has been a propaganda lie since its foundation. As the Trotskyist movement always insisted, NATO was from the outset a war alliance of the great imperialist powers.

When NATO was founded 75 years ago, the magazine Fourth International, which at the time was published by the American Socialist Workers Party under James P. Cannon, declared: “The North Atlantic Pact is not just another military alliance. … The immense significance of this event transcends by far its effect on the ‘cold war’ for which it is immediately designed.”

The crisis of the old imperialist powers of Europe—whose “efforts to ‘pacify’ the insurgent peoples of the East is proving one of the most costly and colossal failures in history”; for whom “it has become well-nigh impossible to achieve ‘stability’ at home with their own resources alone”; and who “are admittedly impotent without outside help, either individually or collectively, to cope with the power of the Soviet Union”—had “obliged American imperialism to become the caretaker of world capitalism.”

“But it can only fulfil this role effectively on a global scale,” the editorial of the Fourth International warned. “For this reason, we have predicted time and again that the road to world domination must be the road to world war.”

These lines are once again of burning relevance today. Seventy-five years after its foundation, NATO is closer to triggering a third world war than ever before.

At NATO’s foundation in 1949, as the division of Germany was sealed and revolution triumphed in China, NATO pursued a violent, counterrevolutionary policy. The US, France and other NATO imperialist powers waged brutal colonial wars in Indochina, Korea, Algeria and beyond. NATO went on to back coups in Greece and Turkey and against left-wing, nationalist governments across Africa and Latin America to curb the influence of the Soviet Union.

In the American ruling elite, however, a conflict broke out over whether to fight the Soviet Union through “containment” or through a military “rollback,” risking nuclear war. In the initial period of the Cold War, those in favour of “containment” gained the upper hand. However, US imperialism never gave up its long-term goal of reversing the achievements of the October Revolution and destroying the Soviet Union.

The Cold War ended, however, in 1991, when the Stalinist bureaucracy took the final step in its historical betrayal and liquidated the property relations created by the October Revolution, restored capitalism and dissolved the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

NATO, which had always justified its existence with the danger allegedly posed by the Soviet Union, did not dissolve itself. As the Fourth International had written in 1949, the founding of NATO “transcends by far its effect on the ‘cold war’ for which it is immediately designed”, and that “the road to world domination” was “the road to world war.”

American imperialism saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to re-establish its world domination and reverse the defeats it had suffered in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. Not satisfied with the fact that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and later Putin had opened up the Soviet Union to exploitation by international capital, they wanted Russia’s colonial subjugation.

America’s European allies, pursuing their own imperialist interests, followed its lead. NATO is the instrument with which they pursue this goal. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO or its members have been waging war practically without interruption.

The US first attacked Iraq in 1990. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia without a UN mandate—in violation of international law—and forced the secession of Kosovo. In 2001, NATO invoked the mutual defence clause, for the first and only time, and occupied Afghanistan, conducting a war that lasted 20 years and ended with the destruction of the country and the return of the Taliban. Although subsequent wars against Iraq, Libya and Syria took place outside the official NATO structures, they were supported by most NATO member states.

Parallel to the wars in the Middle East, NATO systematically advanced towards Russia and incorporated the whole of Eastern Europe and—with the Baltic states—parts of the former Soviet Union.

The world’s most powerful military alliance grew from 12 to 32 members. Last year, it spent $1.3 trillion on defense, or 60 percent of global military spending. The US military budget alone totalled $905 billion, more than the next 15 countries combined. In contrast, China only spent $220 billion and Russia $109 billion on defense.

NATO has systematically prepared for war with Russia since 2014, when the US and Germany backed a coup to install a pro-Western puppet regime in Kiev. NATO relentlessly armed Ukraine, ultimately provoking the desperate, reactionary attack by the Putin regime in 2022. NATO then waged a war on Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, that threatens to escalate into nuclear conflict.

This madness is rooted in the insoluble contradictions of the international capitalist system. Private ownership of the means of production and the bourgeois nation-state based upon it cannot be reconciled with the global character of modern production, which unites billions of workers in a single social process. The only answer imperialism knows to this is the violent redivision of the world.

To wage this war, the NATO imperialist powers must build fascistic police-state regimes at home, to suppress mounting opposition in the working class at having to bear the vast costs of militarism and the consequences of the war. The rise of Trump, Meloni, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other neo-fascists is only the sharpest expression of the rightward development of all bourgeois parties.

But the crisis of the capitalist system also creates the conditions for socialist revolution. Fourth International magazine’s April 1949 editorial ended with the words: “The general staffs have carefully calculated all contingencies and eventualities—all but one. That one is the alliance of the peoples of the world who above all want peace. Not the manoeuvrings of the Kremlin, but the class struggle in Shanghai and Indonesia, in Milan, the Ruhr and Detroit will prove the Achilles heel of this unholy compact of death, reaction and dictatorship.”

These words are as relevant today as they were then. Only an international mass movement of the working class, combining the struggle against war with the struggle against capitalist exploitation, can stop the path to world war and nuclear catastrophe.