The Backstory on the War in Ukraine

 Some preliminary thoughts:

 

The same people who condemn the Russians for invading Ukraine have no problem with the US invading countries, overthrowing governments and using drones to attack wedding parties. They seem to have forgotten the Iraq War, a war of choice that the US launched with massive bombing (Shock and Awe) and 250,000 ground forces. The only difference I see is that it was us, not them, doing the killing.

The same media, which is bringing us minute by minute accounts of the brutality of war in Ukraine, seems to have forgotten that the US sent 550,000 troops into a small Asian country 7,000 miles from our borders and used more ordnance than was used by all sides in WW II to subdue a popular nationalist revolution and that still today, our country’s actions are causing mass casualties in Afghanistan, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere. Why is the liberal-dominated media covering this attack on the people of Ukraine so differently? Is it because the people who are dying in Ukraine are white?

The War in the Ukraine

As Russian tanks roll into Ukraine and Russian planes bomb sites in Ukrainian cities creating misery and death and the worst international crisis since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Government and its allies and a compliant media offer a simplistic explanation of what this war is all about. A petty autocrat, described by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “small and pale”, is bent on restoring the power and glory of the former Soviet Union, and has launched this invasion in an attempt to overthrow a democratic government and expand the power of the nation he rules on his way to restoring the old Soviet empire. Based on that analysis, the US and its allies must oppose the invasion by force (economic, for now) and by any and all means necessary if sanctions don’t result in the Russians immediately withdrawing their troops from Ukraine. Appeasement (a word that almost nobody is using, but is the basis of their thinking) is not an option.

In response to the unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, it is absolutely clear that Putin and the Russians who support him, should face international condemnation. But, the problem with simple explanations is that they ignore important factors and limit our understanding of what is really going on and what can and must be done to resolve the crisis. This backstory includes the international context of the crisis and the history that led to it; ignoring these factors almost always leads to disastrous responses including escalation, which can lead down the road to more, and perhaps wider, war. We don’t have to look far in history to find examples. In this case, the one that is most frightening is WW I. I’ll come back to that later.

So, what is the context of the current crisis? Since the end of the Cold War, the dominant military and economic power in the world has been the US, along with its allies in Western Europe and East Asia. That power is assured by the most massive military spending in history (the US spends more than the next 10 countries combined and most of them are our allies in Western Europe) and by an enormous global military presence (the US has bases in more than 80 countries around the world), which protects a system of economic globalization, allowing the continued exploitation of the Global South (formerly the Third World) and extending it to areas in Eastern Europe that were formerly allied with the old Soviet Union.

This system is referred to by the US and its Western European allies as a “rules-based international order”. It has been used to justify US led interventions around the world since the end of WWII, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam and other interventions in dozens of countries to “prevent the spread of Communism”, to the War on Terror (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Africa and on and on) and the widespread use of sanctions, a form of economic warfare, to force other nations to abide by “the rules”. (According to the US Department of the Treasury, the US currently has sanctions of various kinds in operation against more than 25 different countries, and many of whom are also subject to military intervention. In at least one case, Cuba, these sanctions have been in place for 60 years.)

The questions we need to ask is “who made these rules and who benefits from them”? If one looks at the last 80 years, the answer should be clear – the US and its allies in Western Europe (with the more recent addition of a junior partner, the East Asian “Tigers”) have made the rules and the very wealthy in these countries benefit handsomely as a result of them. Very handsomely!

How does China fit into this context? Since the beginning of the new millennium, the economic dominance of US has been challenged by China, which has a loose alliance of convenience with Russia (the enemy of my enemy is my friend?). China’s tremendous economic growth (and its potential for much more) and it’s developing ties to the Global South (The Belt and Road Initiative, which currently includes 145 countries) threatens US/Western European dominance in these areas. It should not be surprising that there is noise in the background of the crisis in Ukraine about a possible Chinese move against Taiwan. There are rumblings of a trade war with China. Different players, same game?

If the context here provides a background, the history provides an understanding of the motives of the players – Ukraine, Russia, NATO and the US. Although Russian and Ukrainian relations go back a long way, the Russians still remember that significant numbers of Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in WW II after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it should be noted that today’s neo–Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, have ties to the Ukrainian military. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov Movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing ultranationalism and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members. 

The current crisis had its origins in the events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the Warsaw Pact and the old Soviet Union in the early 1990s. When the US and its NATO allies were pushing for German reunification, the Soviets (and later the Russians) sought guarantees of their security in the post-Cold War era. A huge sticking point was the expansion of NATO.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been a Cold War alliance, formed by the US and a few of its postwar allies to stop the spread of communism in the late 1940s. It was specifically directed against the Soviet Union, which had set up pro-Soviet governments in the countries it had liberated from the Nazis. The US claimed the Soviets had intensions of overrunning the rest of Europe, even though the incredible losses (at least 25 million dead, including 9 million soldiers) and destruction that SU had suffered during WWII would have made that impossible, besides which the US had the only nuclear weapons and had shown a willingness to use them in 1945.

In reality, NATO (founded in 1949) was the military arm of a massive US effort (including the Marshall Plan, which was even extended to our former WWII enemies, West Germany and Japan, but not to the Soviet Union or Eastern European countries) in order to prevent the possibility that Communist governments would come to power through elections in Western and Southern Europe (which almost happened on a couple of occasions in the immediate aftermath of the war) and to guarantee American political and economic domination of Western Europe. The Russians responded by forming the Warsaw Pact (founded in 1955, dissolved in 1991) as an alliance against the NATO powers. The lines had been drawn and remained relatively stable until 1990, although NATO expanded well beyond its original members and even came to include West Germany.

So, one might imagine that following the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union as the result of an incredibly peaceful revolution, the need for NATO would disappear and a new security system might replace it that would include Russia. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the US and the other NATO powers moved to expand NATO further and further east.

The first expansion came during the reunification of Germany. West Germany had been part of NATO and the US wanted to keep Germany (the largest and most powerful NATO member after the US) in NATO. In order to get Russian acquiescence, the US made it clear that there would be no further expansion of NATO to the east so as not to threaten Russian security. While there is a debate as to whether the US made an explicit pledge, or whether it was implicit, it is clear that as Boris Yeltsin wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton referring to the “Two Plus Four Treaty”, which pertained to the reunification of Germany, “The spirit of the treaty precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the East.”

Opposition to NATO expansion was not limited to the democratically elected Russian leader during the 1990s. Jack Matlock, who was US Ambassador to Moscow at the time of German reunification, has stated that “categorical assurances” were given that NATO would not expand eastward. George Kennan, author of the Cold War doctrine of containment, had this to say about the expansion of NATO in the late 1990s:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history. Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are (emphasis is mine) — but this is just wrong.”

 

However, despite the agreement, explicit or tacit, not to expand eastward, more and more nations which had been part of the Warsaw Pact and then those which had been part of the Soviet Union were encouraged to join the alliance as it took on the task of containing, not communism, but Russia, the same Russia that had participated in the dismantling of the old Soviet Union.

It might be worth adding here, that the US “War on Terrorism” also added to, what from the Russian perspective, looked like encirclement. Iraq and Afghanistan (along with NATO member Turkey) would provide a southern tier of countries to what could be described as a tightening noose around Russia. US wars in the Middle East also shored up the West’s access to oil in the economic competition with Russia and China. This was certainly a factor in Russia’s military intervention in Syria.

In a sense, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an escalation of what it views as the only way it has to respond to the Western expansion and encirclement. Push the bear up against the wall and it should surprise no one that it becomes aggressive. The continuing expansion of NATO has done just that.

Why Ukraine? The issue of NATO expansion has been raised by the Russians again and again, but it is Ukraine that has sparked Russian military intervention, first around Crimea and now. In terms of geopolitical importance, Ukraine is far and above the most significant of the former republics of the Soviet Union. Its population is roughly 1/3 that of Russia and much larger than any of the other former Soviet republics and its location (a long border with Russia and major ports on the Black Sea, make it critical, from the Russian standpoint, that it not become part of an anti-Russian alliance. Russian security, both militarily and economically, depends on a neutral, or non-aligned, Ukraine.

Much of what passes for analysis in the West is a crude attempt to revive the anticommunism of the first Cold War. “Putin in 2022, like Stalin in 1939, is attempting to reconfigure the geopolitical balance of power.”  “Putin, like Stalin, is attempting to enlarge his state and expand its influence with revanchist claims to territories that had once been part of a larger empire.” “Putin, the former KGB foreign intelligence officer…” There is no mention in these reports about the run up to war of US involvement in the 2014 coup in Ukraine or that, since 2014, the U.S. has sent over $2.7 billion in weapons to Ukraine. There is no mention of the fact that the Ukrainian government has ignored the Minsk Agreement for years by attempting to reassert control over Donetsk and Luhansk or that there were over 5,000 violations of the cease fire in Donetsk and Luhansk by both sides in just the 4 days prior to the Russian invasion. All we get is Putin, Putin, Putin.

This analysis and much of the “factual” information coming out of the Ukraine, which is repeated over and over again in the media, even in some sources that consider themselves progressive, needs to be carefully vetted. As the fog of war settles over the crisis in Ukraine, it is important for the left to shed light on what is really happening.

Which brings me back to WWI. While the government and media are trying to convince us that what we are facing is the lead up to WWII and that negotiations on the causes of the conflict are tantamount to appeasement, I think we need to look at WWI as a more accurate forerunner to the current situation. The conflict in WWI resulted from the clash of capitalists of the old imperial system (or world order) dominated by Britain, with capitalists from the rising imperial power, Germany. As a result, both these empires stumbled into what was the most destructive war in history up until that time, a war that was dubbed “The War to End all Wars”. Unfortunately, many of the largest left political parties in Europe, the Social Democrats, rallied around their own capitalists and supported the war, sending millions of workers off to die in the trenches.

Should we make the same mistakes this time, we will have the final war to end all wars.

What is to be done to prevent that? Below are some ideas from a major peace organization in the US, Code Pink, and from the DSA (a descendent of the one Socialist party that chose not to support the war in 1917 and whose leader, Eugene V. Debs, went to jail for his opposition).

 

From Code Pink

“During this perilous time, when further military escalation could trigger a Chernobyl radioactive meltdown or push us to the brink of nuclear annihilation, we urge President Biden and Congress to stop the flow of weapons to Ukraine, offer humanitarian assistance and safe refuge, renew lapsed arms control treaties (Anti-Ballistic Missile, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, Open Skies) the U.S. abandoned and reject the imposition of massive sanctions that will harm the Russian people who, like us, want peace and security.”

From the Democratic Socialists of America

“The Democratic Socialists of America condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demands immediate diplomacy and de-escalation to resolve this crisis. We stand in solidarity with the working classes of Ukraine and Russia who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of this war, and with antiwar protestors in both countries and around the world who are calling for a diplomatic resolution.

“This extreme and asymmetrical escalation is an illegal act under the United Nations Charter and severely threatens the livelihoods and well-being of working-class peoples in Ukraine, Russia, and across the region. We urge an immediate ceasefire and the total withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine. 

There is no solution through war or further intervention. This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict.

“DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. We call on antiwar activists in the US and across the world to oppose violent escalations, demand a lasting diplomatic solution, and stress the crucial need to accept any and all refugees resulting from this crisis. Much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack. While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative.” 

  

George Vlasits

Vietnam War draft resister

Postscript – 3/2/22

Things could get a lot worse for the Ukrainians. Russia’s invasion has not followed the typical pattern of the Russian military, which depends on the heavy use of artillery (much like the US’s use of air power, witness Iraq and Vietnam.)

Recent reading of a posting from Chartbook #90 by a military historian, Adam Tooze, places this war in the context of a number of conflicts since the “end” of the Cold War. At this point it is neither the largest nor anywhere near the most devastating of the ‘medium size” wars since 1990, which “is not one characterized only by small-scale irregular conflict, fundamentalist insurgencies and the like. It has been punctuated by the explosion of wars involving substantial contingents of regular troops numbering between 50 and 200,000 strong” and resulting in deaths of hundreds of thousands (in the case of Central African conflicts, millions) of civilians as well as combatants.

To put it bluntly, the US and its NATO allies have failed miserably to keep the peace and provide security in Europe and around the world. That objective cannot be accomplished by wasting the resources of our country on a bloated military and providing governments more and more military aid. It cannot be done by waging war. The Warfare State of the Union address delivered by President Biden does not give me any hope that the Democratic Party leadership represents the needs of ordinary Americans, much less what has to change to begin to provide real security and peace in the international arena. Increasingly, I get the feeling that it is 1968 all over again.