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Ukraine orders massive military expansion

RT | February 1, 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed an order to expand the country’s military, including bolstering the ranks of its army by at least 100,000 soldiers over the next three years, prolonging service contracts, and boosting pay.

Zelensky announced the news on Tuesday at an open session of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, saying, “I’ve signed an order to strengthen the defense capabilities of Ukraine. It stipulates an increase of 100,000 in the size of the army, an expansion of the program for housing troops, and an increase in their salaries.”

He clarified that the order is intended to help professionalize the Ukrainian army, “and not because there is war.”

In addition to adding 100,000 troops, the plan will extend their contracts and create 20 new brigades within the armed forces. It will also bump up service members’ pay to a minimum of three times the minimum wage, which is currently 6,500 hryvnias ($225).

The Ukrainian army currently consists of around 260,000 troops, making it the 22nd largest in the world. An increase of 100,000 would put it about equal with Turkey and Thailand, in 15th place. Russia has the fifth-most active military personnel in the world, at just over one million, and the US is third, with 1.4 million, after India and China.

In 2021, Ukraine spent $5.4 billion on its military, Russia spent $48 billion, and the US spent $750 billion, more than the next 10 countries combined.

Western leaders have been warning for months that Russia could be planning an invasion of Ukraine in the near future, citing reports of a buildup of around 100,000 troops near the two countries’ border. Moscow has denied that it has any aggressive intentions, and has called for security deals that would limit the expansion of NATO, the US-led military bloc, in eastern Europe.

Last week, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that President Joe Biden had authorized an additional $200 million of military assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and “large quantities of artillery.”

February 1, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

NATO — Strategic Asset or Liability?

BY PAT BUCHANAN • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 1, 2022

Is the territorial integrity of Ukraine a cause worth America’s fighting a war with Russia?

No, it is not. And this is why President Joe Biden has declared that the U.S. will not become militarily involved should Russia invade Ukraine.

Biden is saying that, no matter our sentiments, our vital interests dictate staying out of a Russia-Ukraine war.

But why then does Secretary of State Antony Blinken continue to insist there is an “open door” for Ukraine to NATO membership — when that would require us to do what U.S. vital interests dictate we not do: fight a war with Russia for Ukraine?

NATO’s “open door policy” is based on Article 10, which declares that NATO members, “may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State … to accede to this Treaty.”

Moreover, membership is open to “any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.”

Note that NATO admission requires “unanimous” consent of all 30 present members.

Blinken has often stated this as U.S. policy: “From our perspective, NATO’s door is open and remains open, and that is our commitment.”

What Blinken is saying is this: While America will not fight for Ukraine today, America remains open to Ukraine’s accession to NATO, in which event we would have to fight for Ukraine tomorrow, were it attacked by Russia.

What the U.S. needs to do is to say with clarity that while Ukraine is free to apply to NATO, NATO is free to veto that application, and the enlargement of NATO beyond its present eastern frontiers is over, done.

In this crisis, we need to recall how and why NATO was created.

In 1949, the year China fell to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin exploded an atom bomb, we formed NATO as a defensive alliance to prevent a Russian drive west, from the Elbe to the Rhine to the Channel.

Of the original 12 members of NATO, the U.S. and Canada were on the western side of the Atlantic. Iceland and the U.K. were islands in the Atlantic. France and Portugal were on the Atlantic’s eastern shore.

Denmark, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg were astride the avenue of attack the Red Army would have to take to reach the Channel.

Norway was the lone original NATO nation that shared a border with the USSR itself. Italy was the 12th member.

Clearly, this was a defensive alliance to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe such as Hitler had executed in the spring of 1940, when Nazi Germany overran Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, and threw the British off the continent at Dunkirk.

Nations that joined NATO during the Cold War were Greece and Turkey in 1952, Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982.

But, with the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the overthrow of Soviet Communism, and the breakup of the USSR into 15 nations by 1991, NATO, its goal — the defense of Central and Western Europe — achieved, its job done, did not go out of business.

Instead, NATO added 14 new members and moved almost 1,000 miles east, into Russia’s front yard and then onto Russia’s front porch.

The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia became NATO nations in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.

Understandably, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked himself: To what end, and for what beneficent purpose, was this doubling in size of an alliance that was formed to contain us, and, if necessary, fight a war against Mother Russia?

Alliances, which involve war guarantees, commitments to fight in defense of the allied nations, invariably carry costs and risks as well as rewards and benefits in terms of strengthened security.

But when we brought Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into NATO, what benefits in added strength did we receive to justify the provocation this would be to Russia, and the risk it might entail if Moscow objected and, one fine day, walked back into these Baltic states?

If we will not fight for the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, the second largest nation in Europe with a population of over 40 million people, why would we go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Estonia, a tiny and almost indefensible nation with a population of 1.3 million?

Besides Ukraine, two nations have been considering membership in NATO: Finland and Georgia. Accession of either would put NATO on yet another border of Russia, with the usual U.S. bases and forces.

While this would enrage Russia, how would it make us stronger?

Perhaps, instead of adding new nations on whose behalf we will go to war with a great power like Russia, we consider reducing the roster of NATO and restricting the number of nations for whom we must fight to those nations that are vital to our security and bring added strength to the alliance.

February 1, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia & China may be ready to challenge America’s ‘Monroe Doctrine’

By Paul Robinson | RT | February 1, 2022

For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine – asserting a US sphere of influence over Latin America – has been a cornerstone of American policy. But as Russia and China assert their opposition to the US-led world order, American dominance in the region is beginning to look a little shaky.

As the “Russian invasion” scare enters its fourth month, and Russian tanks still fail to roll into Kiev, the parameters of Moscow’s likely response to the West’s rejection of its security demands are becoming a little clearer. Frustrated with what it sees as decades of Western contempt for its concerns, Moscow has demanded that the US offer it security guarantees, including a promise not to expand NATO further to the east. As has become clear through America’s negative response this week, the US has no intention of doing as Russia desires. The issue is now how the Kremlin will react.

Despite hysterical headlines in the Western media about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has categorically ruled this option out. “Our nation has likewise repeatedly stated that we have no intention to attack anyone. We consider the very thought that our people may go to war against each other unacceptable,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev this week.

This is not surprising. Russian officials and security experts have repeatedly made clear that Ukraine is a secondary issue and that their primary concern is a much broader one – the general nature of the international system and of the security architecture in Europe. The idea that failure to achieve agreement on the latter would lead to the invasion of the former was never very logical. Instead of targeting Ukraine, Russia’s response to the current diplomatic impasse is much more likely to be directed at the party deemed by Moscow to be most responsible for the problem, namely the US.

And what better way to do this than to challenge America in its own back yard? Since President James Monroe declared his famous “doctrine” in 1832 – according to which any foreign interference in the politics of the Americas is deemed a hostile act against Washington – the US has fiercely asserted its primacy in both North and South America.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in successive US administrations’ efforts to depose the government of Cuba, as well as the imposition of sanctions on that country for over 60 years. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Washington made it clear that it was willing even to risk nuclear war to prevent potentially hostile weaponry being deployed close to its borders. Meanwhile, elsewhere it has used other methods to undermine or overthrow Latin American governments deemed insufficiently friendly. These include supporting coups and insurgencies, such as aiding the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

But Washington’s ability to bend Latin America to its will appears somewhat weakened. Support for regime change in Bolivia and Honduras has backfired, with members of the deposed governments having returned to power. Meanwhile, China is expanding its Belt and Road Initiative into South America, with seven countries having signed up to join and negotiations under way with Nicaragua to add an eighth. The US is no longer the only player in town.

Russia has now stepped into the mix. In the past few weeks, President Vladimir Putin has held telephone conversations with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all countries with whom Washington has very poor relations. According to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, agreement was reached with all three “to deepen our strategic partnership, with no exceptions, including military and military-technical.”

Asked if this meant deploying Russian troops to those countries, Lavrov’s deputy Sergey Ryabkov failed to rule it in, but failed to rule it out also. “The president of Russia has spoken multiple times on the subject of what the measures could be, for example involving the Russian Navy, if things are set on the course of provoking Russia, and further increasing the military pressure on us by the US,” he said.

A much-discussed extreme option would involve going back to 1962 and placing missiles in Cuba or Venezuela. Given that Russia now has missiles with hypersonic capabilities, this would give it the capacity to strike the US in a matter of minutes, rendering any defense impossible.

It seems unlikely, though, that the Russian government would take such a provocative step unless the US first did something similar in Ukraine or elsewhere close to the Russian border. Even the option mentioned by Ryabkov of some Russian naval deployment to the region is far from certain. “We can’t deploy anything” to Cuba, said former president Dmitry Medvedev this week, arguing that it would harm that country’s prospects of improving its relations with the US and “would provoke tension in the world.”

Still, the threat of such action now dangles in the air. So, too, does the possibility of lesser options, such as additional arms sales as well as economic assistance to enable the Cubans and others to resist American sanctions. For now, we will have to wait and see exactly what “military and military-technical” measures Moscow has in mind. But it is likely that whatever it is will not be to the Americans’ liking. Nor will Russia’s more general support of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Reacting to talk of Russian military deployments in the Americas, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has promised that the Americans would respond “decisively.” This is somewhat ironic, since Sullivan and his peers in the US government seem to deny Russia the right to respond to American deployments close to its borders. But that is by the by. In reality, it’s hard to see what Washington could actually do, short of starting a catastrophic war. Efforts to overthrow the Cuban and Venezuelan government having failed, and economic ties having been almost fully broken, its leverage against those countries is weak.

Washington now has to face the reality that while it remains the foremost power in the world, it can no longer be fully confident of its hegemony even close to home. Its decline is a very gradual process. Nothing very dramatic will likely result from Russia’s latest announcement. It is also possible that Moscow would have decided to cooperate more deeply with Cuba and others even in the absence of current East-West tensions. But had relations been good, one can imagine that the Kremlin might have been inclined not to challenge the US in its own neighborhood.

As it is, the news highlights the fact that pressuring Russia is not a cost-free option from Washington’s point of view and may well rebound to its disadvantage. That’s something that the authorities in the White House could do well to consider.

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.

February 1, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The U.S. Government Will Be Responsible for Ukraine Deaths

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 31, 2022

Despite the fact that U.S. officials are playing the innocent in the Ukraine crisis, the fact is that the U.S. government will be responsible for the death toll that results from a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s because it is the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, who have precipitated the crisis.

If the U.S. government had not kept NATO in existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, Russia would not be feeling the need to invade Ukraine today. Or if the U.S. government had not had NATO absorb former Warsaw Pact countries and then threaten to absorb Ukraine, Russia would not be feeling the need to invade Ukraine today. The only reason that Russia feels the need to invade Ukraine today is because the Pentagon and the CIA kept NATO in existence and then had NATO move its forces eastward toward Russia’s borders by gobbling up former Warsaw Pact countries and by then threatening to do the same with Ukraine.

It should be noted that Congress has never specifically approved any of this NATO absorption. Ultimately, it’s the Pentagon and the CIA who make the determination as to who NATO will absorb and not absorb, notwithstanding the fact that the lives of America’s young people are being pledged to the defense of these countries.

U.S. officials innocently claim that Russia has nothing to fear from NATO troops, missiles, and tanks along Russia’s border. They say that the U.S. government is a peace-loving government that would never do anything bad to Russia.

Really? How about asking the Afghan people about that peace-loving bit? Or maybe the Iraqi people. My hunch is that they might have a slight disagreement with that peace-loving bit. Or maybe the Iranian people, who have suffered under years from brutal U.S. economic sanctions. Or the Cuban people, who have suffered for decades from the brutal U.S. embargo.

Moreover, let’s not forget something important: Those NATO forces on Russia’s border will include Germany, whose forces invaded Russia and killed more than 20 million Russian people. Yes, 20 million! That’s a lot of people. I suppose the Pentagon and the CIA would argue that the Russians just need to get over that.

Oh, yes, I know that U.S. officials are saying that Ukraine is a sovereign and independent country that has the “right” to join NATO. But if it really is a sovereign and independent country, then why did U.S. officials intervene in Ukraine to bring about regime change that ended up installing a pro-U.S. puppet regime in the country? Doesn’t a genuinely sovereign and independent nation have the “right” to be free from that sort of foreign interventionism?

While we are on the subject of sovereignty and independence, how do U.S. officials justify their decades-long interventions against Cuba? That’s a sovereign and independent country, isn’t it? Cuba has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. It’s always been the exact opposite. The Pentagon and the CIA have aggressed against Cuba since 1959 with their brutal embargo against the Cuban people, their assassination plots against Fidel Castro, their assassination partnership with the Mafia, their invasion of Cuba, and their acts of sabotage and terrorism within Cuba.

Moreover, let’s not forget the U.S. response when Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba back in 1962. Correct me if I’m wrong but the Pentagon/CIA response was not to claim that the Russians had the “right” to do that because Cuba was a sovereign and independent country. Their response, if I recall it correctly, was to go ballistic, exhorting President Kennedy to immediately begin bombing and invading the country.

In other words, the U.S. reaction to having Russian troops, tanks, and missiles 90 miles away from America’s border was quite similar to the Russian response to having German and American troops, tanks, and missiles right next to Russia’s borders.

Indeed, when Russian President Putin recently suggested that Russia might install troops or missiles in Cuba and Venezuela, U.S. officials had the same reaction that Russia has toward U.S. plans to install troops and missiles on Russia’s border. How’s that for a bit of hypocrisy?

After 20 years of death, injuries, maiming, suffering, misery, lies, and destruction from the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, Pentagon and CIA officials haven’t skipped a beat. Everything is business as usual, with ever-expanding budgets, power, and influence — and, of course, perpetual crises to justify it all.

The question is: How long are the American people going to put up with all this deadly, destructive, and dangerous interventionism? There is no better time than now to put a stop to it. Dismantle NATO, end all foreign interventionism, abandon all foreign military bases, bring all U.S. troops home and discharge them, dismantle America’s national-security establishment, and restore our founding system of a limited-government republic. That’s what is needed to get America back on the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.

January 31, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How the West plays innocent over NATO expansion

The seeds of the current crisis were sown several decades ago, when Washington decided to double-deal with Moscow

By Professor Alfred de Zayas | RT | January 30, 2022

The current and rapidly escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have dominated international headlines and moved stock markets in recent weeks. In reality, they have their roots in a series of NATO actions and omissions following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989/91. On the Russian side, there is a widespread perception that Moscow was misled by both Washington and NATO, a pervasive malaise about a breach of trust, and a violation of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on fundamental issues of national security.

While the US protests that it never gave assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards, declassified documents prove otherwise. But even in the absence of declassified documents and contemporary statements by political leaders in 1989/91, including Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (which can be confirmed on YouTube), it is all too obvious that there is a festering wound caused by NATO’s eastward expansion over the past 30 years, which has undoubtedly negatively impacted Russia’s sense of security. No country likes to be encircled, and common sense should tell us that maybe we should not be provoking another nuclear power. At the very least, NATO’s provocations are unwise; at worst, they could spell apocalypse.

We in the West play innocent, and retreat into ‘positivism’, asserting that there was no signed treaty commitment, that the assurances were not written in stone. Yet realpolitik tells us that if one side breaks its word or is perceived as having double-crossed the other, if it acts in a manner contrary to the spirit of an agreement and to the overriding principle of good faith (bona fide), there will be political consequences.

It seems, however, that we in the West have become so used to what I would call a ‘culture of cheating’, that we react in a surprised fashion when another country does not simply accept that we cheated them in the past, and that, notwithstanding this breach of trust, they should accept the ‘new normal’ and resume ‘business as usual’ as if nothing had happened. Our leaders in the US, UK and EU contend that they have a clean conscience and refuse to consider the fact that the other side does feel uncomfortable about having been taken for a ride. A rational person, a fortiori a statesman, would pause and try to defuse the ‘misunderstanding’. Yet the US culture of cheating has become so second nature to us that we do not even realise when we are cheating someone else, and we seem incapable of understanding that denying our actions and reneging on our words adds insult to injury.

The culture of cheating is in the family of the doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. We self-righteously claim the right to cheat others, but do not accept that others can cheat us. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi (that which Jupiter can do is not permitted for the bovines). This constitutes a kind of predator behaviour that neither religion nor civilisation has succeeded in eradicating. We mount false-flag operations and accuse the other side of the same. The CIA and M15 have been caught red-handed on so many occasions, yet no one seems to be asking whether, in the long run, such conduct is counter-productive, whether our credibility is shot.

Perhaps one explanation for this kind of behaviour is that we have elevated the culture of cheating to a kind of secular virtue – equivalent to cunning, daring and boldness. It is seen as a positive attribute when a leader is ‘craftier’ and ‘sneakier’ than his/her rival. The name of the game is to score points in an atmosphere of perpetual competition where there are no rules. Our geopolitical competitors are just that – rivals – and there is no interest whatsoever in fraternising with adversaries. Co-operation is somehow perceived as ‘weak’, as ‘un-American’. ‘Dirty tricks’ are not seen as dishonest but as clever, even patriotic, because they are intended to advance the economic and political interests of our country. In a way, ‘dirty tricks’ are perceived in a positive light, as artful, ingenious, adventurous, even visionary. This curious approach to reality is facilitated by a compliant and complicit corporate media that does not call our bluff and, instead, disseminates ‘fake news’ and suppresses dissenting views. Unless an individual has the presence of mind to do his/her own research and to access other sources of information, he/she is caught in the propaganda web.

The US government has practised this culture of cheating in its international relations for over 200 years, particularly in its dealings with the First Nations of the continent, who were lied to over and over, and whose lands and resources were shamelessly stolen. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, “Our nation was born in genocide”. How many ‘Indian’ treaties were broken, again and again? And when the Sioux, Cree and Navajo protested, we massacred them. See the studies of the United Nations’ Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. This ‘culture of cheating’ is documented countless times in connection with the Monroe Doctrine and US relations with Mexico, Latin America, Hawaii, the Philippines and so on.

One of the elements that is totally missing from the Ukraine debate is the right of self-determination of peoples. Undoubtedly the Russians in Ukraine are not just a minority, but constitute a ‘people’, and, as such, the Russians in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea possess the right of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter and in Article 1 common to the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Until the deliberately anti-Russian coup d’état of February 2014, the Ukrainians and Russian-Ukrainians had lived side by side in relative harmony. The Maidan brought with it Russophobic elements that have since been exacerbated by systematic war propaganda and incitement to hatred, both of which are prohibited by Article 20 of the ICCPR. Thus, it is not certain whether the Russians in the Donbass feel safe enough to want to continue living with Ukrainians who have been and are being incited to hate them. Back in March and June 1994, I monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine as a representative of the UN Secretary-General. I travelled around the country. There was no doubt that the Russian speakers had a profound sense of Russian identity.

There would be no conflict in Ukraine today – although both Kiev and Moscow deny an invasion is imminent – if Barack Obama, Under Secretary of State for Political AffairsVictoria Nuland and several European leaders had not destabilised the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich and organised a vulgar coup to install Western puppets. Bottom line: Western interference in the internal affairs of other states can backfire, and the culture of cheating and deceit that we continue to practise renders it impossible to reach sustainable solutions. The UN Charter, the only mandate underpinning the existing ‘rules-based international order’, has the necessary mechanisms to resolve our differences on the basis of the principles of sovereign equality of states and the self-determination of peoples.

Professor Alfred de Zayas is an international law expert at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order from 2012-18.

January 30, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Why Smedley Butler left the imperialist front despising ‘Gangsters of Capitalism’

New book shows how the American general’s contempt for ‘the racket’ was born during his service in the 20th century ‘small wars.’

Review by Daniel Larison | Responsible Statecraft | January 28, 2022

Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history, and by the end of his life he was also one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. imperialism that he had spent most of his life enforcing. That contradiction between Butler the antiwar critic and Butler the builder of empire is at the heart of an important new book by Jonathan Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. Katz’s book is an essential reminder of what the U.S. did during those decades and of the lasting effects that those interventions had on the countries where Butler went.

Butler took part in America’s so-called “small wars” in Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America in the early twentieth century. Like those wars, his military career has mostly been forgotten by the American public. That career was defined by aggressive military interventions on behalf of corporate interests, and by the end he was disgusted by it. As the author of War Is a Racket, Butler has been an inspiration to many antiwar and anti-imperialist Americans over the years, but he was also one of the military officers responsible for implementing destructive American colonialist designs at the expense of other nations. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor, he never believed he had done anything to deserve it, and the massacre that he took part in at Fort Rivière in Haiti haunted him.

In his later life, Butler came to see much of his career as a disreputable series of actions in the service of wealthy American interests, and he called himself a “racketeer for capitalism.” The racket he denounced was one that benefited a very few at the expense of the many. That core problem with our foreign policy that Butler identified almost ninety years ago is still very much with us. The U.S. still wages unnecessary wars based on flimsy pretexts against countries that cannot possibly threaten us, and today it also enables other wars with its weapons sales. The military budget grows every year despite the extraordinary physical security that the United States enjoys, and the hunt for new monsters to slay is unending. The racket is bigger and more destructive than ever.

Katz has produced a superb book in which he traces Butler’s steps from his first deployment to Cuba through his last mission in China. Through extensive use of Butler’s correspondence with his family, Katz is able to reconstruct to a remarkable degree what Butler thought about his various missions. Occasionally, there are flashes of anger at policies he was ordered to carry out that anticipate his later antiwar arguments. Appalled by the losses suffered during the invasion of Veracruz in 1914, he applauded his father’s belated vote in Congress against the mission. Katz writes, “The trauma fed Butler’s misgivings about the immorality and pointlessness of war.”

To read Butler’s story is to be reminded of our country’s long and ugly history of dominating many of our weaker neighbors. As Katz shows throughout the book, these countries are still living with the effects of those policies a century later. Katz traveled extensively to visit all the places where Butler served to learn more about his experiences and to document the legacy of the interventions in which Butler participated, and he bears witness to the lasting damage that U.S. policies have done. While most Americans know little or nothing about these interventions, many people in the affected countries still remember what U.S. forces did when they were there.

Butler is most loathed in Haiti, where he is viewed simply as “the Devil” and mechan (evil), because of his role in forcibly dissolving Haiti’s National Assembly to push through a new constitution, his reintroduction of a cruel system of forced labor, and the counterinsurgency campaign he waged against Haitian resistance to American rule. The Gendarmerie that Butler created became the national army and went on to interfere in and dominate Haitian politics for much of the rest of the century.

The outrages that the U.S. committed in its wars in the Philippines and Haiti, among other places, still affect how the U.S. is perceived today. The police and military institutions that the occupying U.S. authorities created in several countries became the apparatus of oppression used by later dictators, some of whom, like the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, had been trained by the U.S. and became U.S. client rulers. During his brief time as the head of Philadelphia’s police force, Butler used the tactics he had employed against insurgents in other countries to fight “bandits” at home in an early example of the militarization of the police and the abuses that came with it.

The period of U.S. foreign policy between the start of the war with Spain and WWII is often wrongly described as “isolationist,” but no one can look at these decades of frequent, violent intervention in the affairs of other nations in the early twentieth century and still believe that. The U.S. took sides in Mexico’s civil war, it invaded other countries on the slightest pretext that a foreign rival might be gaining influence, and it militarily occupied some of them for years or decades. Like colonial empires the world over, the U.S. dominated weaker nations because it could and because its political leaders saw some economic advantage to be exploited.

While these interventions benefited private interests and were done on their behalf, they did nothing to make the United States more secure and were never really intended to. As Butler concluded in his later years, America’s colonial possessions in the Pacific only exposed the country to the dangers of a new, much larger war. “Sooner or later, if we hold onto them, America will be jerked into a damn war before we know what it’s all about,” Butler told a reporter in 1933. That was why he became an early supporter of independence for the Philippines as part of his broader antiwar advocacy. Butler did not live to see that prediction come true, but he was proven right eight years later.

Today there are still some neo-imperialists that look back on the “small wars” Butler fought as a model for how the U.S. should police the globe. Butler would be among the first to reject that idea out of hand. If his experience teaches us anything, it is that wars for empire cause tremendous harm to both the people being dominated and to the people sent to fight in those wars. Gangsters of Capitalism is an excellent account of Butler’s career, and it is also an outstanding history of the development of overseas American imperialism. The wars that Butler fought in anticipated and paved the way for the later militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and they serve as cautionary tales of the long-term harm that military intervention usually does to the nations that experience it. In order to find a way to stop the endless wars for good, we need to remember and learn from the brutal history of America’s empire-building.

January 30, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

US Asks Hungary To Host Troops Aimed At Russia, Despite Long Snubbing Orbán

Suddenly Washington wants something from Hungary, after seeking to isolate and humiliate Budapest…

Viktor Orbán via Reuters
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 28, 2022

It’s been revealed that the United States approached Hungary this week to ask the country to host a temporary troop deployment related to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto “received an American request about temporary deployment of troops” – CNN reports.

Hungary’s Defense Ministry is said to be discussing the formal request; however, given the tense US administration relationship with the Viktor Orbán government since Biden took office – centered on seeking to isolate the conservative prime minister known for his unapologetic ‘Hungary first’ policies – the prospect remains highly unlikely. This comes as Biden announced Friday that he’ll be sending a small number of American forces to Eastern Europe: “I’ll be moving troops to eastern Europe in the NATO countries in the near term.” He qualified in the remarks reporters at Joint Base Andrews after returning from Pittsburg that this will be “not too many” troops.

A mere less than two months ago, Biden tried to humiliate Hungary’s “human rights backsliding” leader:

On Thursday and Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden will gather leaders from over 100 countries to a virtual “Summit for Democracy.” He invited rule-of-law troublemaker Poland. He invited Serbia, despite some questionable democratic credentials. He invited every EU member but one.

That one was Hungary.

CNN further reports that Romania and Bulgaria are also mulling the acceptance of additional US deployments. Both eastern European NATO countries are typically much more amenable to US security requests, and Romania already provocatively hosts coastal defense missiles on the Black Sea.

Among the security guarantees Russia is currently seeking from Washington and Brussels is precisely that NATO forces leave Bulgaria and Romania.

Thus when it comes to Hungary, from the point of view of officials in Budapest they are unlikely to want to see their country thrust into the middle of the tense escalating Russia vs. West standoff.

“The deployments would number approximately 1,000 personnel to each country and would be similar to the forward battle groups currently stationed in the Baltic States and Poland,” CNN notes of the numbers under initial discussion – though without doubt this would be ramped up in the instance of any potential Russian incursion into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in a Russian media interview FM Sergey Lavrov said Friday “If it’s up to the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We do not want wars. But we won’t allow the West to grossly ignore our interests, either,” according to Sputnik.

January 29, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Blinken’s response to Russia NATO demand is frankly disturbing

By Marcus Stanley | Responsible Statecraft | January 27, 2022

Yesterday the U.S. State Department submitted written responses to Russian negotiating positions in the ongoing U.S.-Russia negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. The exact text and details of the responses are confidential. However, Secretary of State Blinken’s statement regarding the content of the U.S. response is disturbing. At a press briefing, Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. refusal to engage with the core Russian position that the Ukraine should not be permitted to enter NATO, adding that in the written response “we make clear that there are core principles that we are committed to uphold and defend — including Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances.”

This is problematic from several perspectives. At the most basic level, it indicates that the U.S. is refusing to seek compromise regarding what Russia believes to be a core national security interest, namely that the U.S. should not make an alliance commitment to the military defense of Ukraine. Russia views Ukraine as a strategically critical nation due to its location directly on the Russian border and deep historical and cultural ties to Eastern Ukraine.

As Secretary Blinken must understand, NATO membership is not a decision made by Ukraine alone, and his claim that NATO membership is simply a matter of the Ukraine’s “right to choose” its own security arrangements is deeply misleading. NATO membership involves a two-way commitment, not simply the free choices of the entering member. Current alliance members must commit to mutual defense of the new member. Since the U.S. has by far the largest and most effective military forces in NATO, the most vital element of NATO membership is the American commitment to defend member borders. So Russia’s negotiating position is directed at a potential American commitment to defend Ukraine. Rather than engage honestly with the question of whether such an American military commitment really makes sense, Blinken deflects and reframes it as a matter of “core principles” around Ukraine’s choices and sovereignty.

In the long term, this indicates an unwillingness to grapple with the question of how to align American military commitments and resources with our long-term strategic interests, and whether Ukraine represents a core interest which justifies the placement of many tens or even hundreds of thousands of new troops in Europe and risking a major war with another nuclear power.

More importantly in the short term, it digs the U.S. into a position “on principle” that no compromise whatsoever is available on the critical question of Ukrainian membership in NATO. This is particularly confusing because the Biden Administration has been clear that it is currently unwilling to directly commit the U.S. military to the defense of Ukraine – which is precisely what would be immediately required if Ukraine became a NATO member. A credible defense for Ukraine would require a massive increase in U.S. forces in Europe, possibly approaching Cold War level ground and air forces. It is hard to see any domestic appetite for expending this level of resources, and internationally an immediate beneficiary would be China.

January 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia comments on risk of war with West

RT | January 28, 2022

With tensions running high between Russia and the US, Moscow’s top diplomat has insisted that his country does not want a full-blown conflict to break out, but also warned it will not stand aside and watch well-flagged security concerns be ignored.

Speaking to news outlets as part of a broadcast interview on Friday morning, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was asked whether fighting could break out after talks over guarantees that NATO will not expand ended in deadlock.

“If it is up to the Russian Federation, there will be no war,” he declared.“We do not want wars,” he went on, stressing, however, that officials “will not allow our interests to be brutally attacked or to be ignored either.”

According to Lavrov, Washington’s response to Moscow’s proposals is “almost a model of diplomatic decency.” However, he said that NATO’s answer to the two Russian draft documents “is so ideologized, it breathes the exclusivity of the Alliance, its special mission, its special purpose.”

Lavrov went on to add that if the US is not willing to reconsider its stance on security matters, then Moscow is equally not prepared to make any compromises on its demands. “If they insist that they won’t change their position, we won’t change our position either,” he declared.

The comments come shortly after Moscow received long-awaited answers to its requests for security guarantees, including a pledge that Ukraine will not be admitted to the bloc.

On Thursday, Lavrov said that “there has been no positive response” to Moscow’s core concerns in the document provided by the American side following weeks of talks with their counterparts.

“The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the East and the deployment of highly destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation,” Lavrov explained.

The Kremlin also poured scorn on the response, arguing that the requests from Moscow’s officials had not been fully taken into account by Washington and the US-led military bloc.

At the same time though, according to Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, “there are and should always be prospects… for further dialogue.”

“But as for the substantive dialogue on the draft documents, there are issues of a different nature, but I will not get ahead of myself,” he said.

Last month, Russia handed over two draft treaties, one addressed to Washington and the other to NATO, which it says are aimed at reducing the risk of conflict on the European continent.

Moscow requested that the bloc refrains from any military activity on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact states that joined after 1997, following the fall of the Soviet Union. The US-led military bloc’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said it would unacceptable to create a “two tier” system that prevents it from engaging in activity with some member states.

A separate clause also demanded that Kiev’s ambitions to join the US-led bloc should not be granted. Ruling out NATO expansion closer to Russia’s borders has been a key demand from the country’s officials, with Peskov arguing that it is a question of “life or death.”

January 28, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Big War CEOs: There’s chaos in the world and our prospects are excellent

By Eli Clifton | Responsible Statecraft | January 28, 2022

According to chief executives of the top taxpayer-funded weapons firms, their balance sheets will benefit from the U.S. engaging in great power competition with Russia and China, the recent escalations in the Yemen war, and the potential for a Russian invasion of Ukraine. But at least one CEO didn’t want to give the impression that weapons firms are simply merchants of death, claiming that her firm, the third largest weapons producer in the world, “actually promote[s] human rights proliferation.”

Those comments were all made on quarterly earnings calls this week, at which executives for publicly traded companies speak to investors and analysts who follow their industries and answer questions about their financial outlook.

The occasion brings out a degree of candor about companies’ fundamentals and their business interests that aren’t always disclosed in marketing materials and carefully worded press releases.

For example, CEOs from both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon outright acknowledged that a deteriorating state of global peace and security and an increase in deadly violence are very much in the interest of their employees and investors.

Lockheed CEO James Taiclet assured investors that the $740 billion defense budget — twelve times the budget provided to the State Department to conduct diplomacy — could continue to grow in 2023, a critical metric for weapons contractors, the ultimate recipient of nearly half of all defense spending.

Taiclet said:

But if you look at [defense budget growth] — and it’s evident each day that goes by. If you look at the evolving threat level and the approach that some countries are taking, including North Korea, Iran and through some of its proxies in Yemen and elsewhere, and especially Russia today, these days, and China, there’s renewed great power competition that does include national defense and threats to it. And the history of [the] United States is when those environments evolve, that we do not sit by and just watch it happen. So I can’t talk to a number, but I do think and I’m concerned personally that the threat is advancing, and we need to be able to meet it.

Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes took a cruder approach, appearing to celebrate a potential war over Ukraine and Houthi drone attacks on the UAE as good indicators for future weapons sales, responding to an analyst’s question about increased demand for weapons “from international countries just given the rising tensions.”

Hayes said:

… [W]e are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales. We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.

But in a moment of rare self-awareness in the calls, Northrop Grumman’s CEO attempted to distance herself from the celebration of increased global conflict by making the bold claim that the world’s  fifth largest weapons manufacturer — and a trainer of Saudi troops accused of war crimes in Yemen — is a promoter of “global human rights.”

Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden said:

I do want to be clear. We are a defense contractor. And so we are supporting global security missions, largely in areas of deterrents, but also inclusive of weapon systems. And we expect to continue in those businesses because we believe they actually promote global human rights proliferation, not the contrary. But with that said, we have evaluated some portions of our portfolio that I’ve talked about in the past like cluster munitions. And today, making the confirmation that we plan to exit depleted uranium ammo as parts of the portfolio that we no longer wanted to support directly.

No doubt, their departure from the cluster munitions and depleted uranium ammunition business is a positive step for human rights, but the idea that one of the world’s biggest producers of missiles, bombers, drones, and nuclear weapons “promote[s] global human rights” tests the limits of credulity. Time and time again, the earnings calls spotlight the true interests of the weapons industry: an increase in global insecurity and violence leads to an increase in governments’ demands for lethal weapons, which in turn produce an increase in profits for investors in arms production.

January 28, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

The Ukraine crisis, sponsored by US hegemony and war profiteers

New US “lethal aid” for Ukraine, courtesy of US taxpayers and their weapons industry beneficiaries. (U.S. Embassy in Ukraine)
By Aaron Maté | January 26, 2022

The US-Russia standoff over Ukraine has sparked bellicose threats and fears of Europe’s biggest ground war in decades. There are ample reasons to question the prospects of a Russian invasion, and US allies including France, Germany’s now-ousted navy chief, and even Kiev itself appear to share the skepticism.

Another potential scenario is that Russia draws on the Cuban Missile Crisis and positions offensive weapons within the borders of Latin American allies. Whatever the outcome, the crisis has underscored the perils of a second Cold War between the world’s top nuclear powers.

If the path forward is unpredictable, what got us here is easy to trace. The row over Ukraine is the outgrowth of an aggressive US posture toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, driven by hegemonic policymakers and war profiteers in Washington. Understanding that background is key to resolving the current impasse, if the Biden administration can bring itself to alter a dangerous course.

US principles vs. power constraints

Russia’s central demands – binding guarantees to halt the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly in Ukraine, and to prevent offensive weapons from being stationed near its borders – have been publicly dismissed by the U.S government as non-starters.

In rejecting Russian concerns, the Biden administration claims that it is upholding “governing principles of international peace and security.” These principles, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, “reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will.”

The US government’s real-world commitment to these principles is non-existent. For decades, the US has provided critical diplomatic and military cover for Israel’s de-facto annexations, which have expanded its borders to three different strips of occupied territory (the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria’s Golan Heights). The US is by far the world leader in dictating policies to other countries, be it who their leaders should be; how little to pay minimum-wage workers; or how to share energy supplies.

The Biden administration continues to subjugate sovereign countries to its will, whether it’s “neighbors” like blockade-targeted Cuba; coup-targeted Venezuela; sanctions-targeted Nicaragua; or far-away countries like US military-occupied and sanctions-targeted Syria. Biden just recently embraced the longstanding Monroe Doctrine of a US sphere of influence by declaring Latin America to be the United States’ “front yard.”

When not making sanctimonious public pronouncements, US officials are quietly able to acknowledge the real principles that guide their actions. According to the Washington Post, one US official specializing in Russia “believes the Russians are still interested in a real dialogue.” Russia’s real aim, this official says, is “to see whether Washington is willing to discuss any sort of commitment that constrains U.S. power.”

The official added: “The Russians are waiting to see what we’re going to offer, and they’re going to take it back and decide is this serious. Is this something we [the Russians] can sell as a major victory for security, or is it just, from their point of view, another attempt to fob us off and not give us anything?”

If their public statements and actions are any guide, the Biden administration is so far opting for the latter.

Rather than focus on diplomacy, the United States’ reliable British client has been trotted out, Iraq WMD dossier-style (or Steele dossier-style, or Syria dirty war-style), to lodge the explosive allegation that Russia is plotting to install a new leader in Ukraine via a coup. While declaring that the obedient Brits were “Muscular” for shouldering the war-mongering allegation, the New York Times quietly acknowledged that they also “provided no evidence to back up” their claims.

After warning of a “false flag” operation by Russia in Ukraine, the US pulled off a stunt of its own by recalling its embassy personnel out of stated concern for their safety. Unlike the dutiful British, other US allies failed to get the memo, including the EU, which declined to follow suit and even took a pointed swipe at attempts to “dramatize” the situation.

When US officials and allied media voices permit themselves to drop “Wag the Dog” theatrics and entertain the possibility of constraining US power, the Ukraine crisis no longer appears so dangerously intractable.

In the New York Times, veteran national security correspondent David E. Sanger allows that it is “possible” that Putin’s “bottom line in this conflict is straightforward”: obtain a pledge to “stop Ukraine from joining NATO” as well as one that the US and NATO “will never place offensive weapons that threaten Russia’s security in Ukrainian territory.”

On these issues, “there is trading space,” Sanger concedes. Given that “Ukraine is so corrupt, and its grasp of democracy is so tenuous… no one expects it to be accepted for NATO membership in the next decade or two.” Accordingly, Russia could be offered “some kind of assurance that, for a decade, or maybe a quarter-century, NATO membership for Kyiv was off the table.”

In Sanger’s view, the real and “complex” issue is not Ukraine’s NATO status, but “how the United States and NATO operate” there – specifically, by flooding the country with weapons. Since 2014, Sanger writes, the US and NATO allies have provided “Ukraine with what the West calls defensive arms, including the capability to take out Russian tanks and aircraft”, a “flow that has sped up in recent weeks.” Russia – for reasons apparently foreign to Sanger – believes that these “weapons are more offensive than defensive” and “that Washington’s real goal is to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine.” An agreement to address these concerns, an unidentified US official concedes, would be “‘the easiest part of this,’ as long as Russia is willing to pull back its intermediate-range weapons as well.”

Unmentioned by Sanger is that Russia has repeatedly signaled such a willingness, including just last month: Russia’s proposed draft treaty with NATO — issued with the stated aim of resolving the Ukraine standoff — proposes that all sides “not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles” in any area that allows them “to reach the territory of the other Parties.” Also unmentioned is that such deployments were previously banned under the INF Treaty, the Cold War-era pact that the Trump administration abandoned in August 2019, to the resounding silence of Democratic lawmakers and allied media outlets more invested in pretending that Trump was a Russian puppet than in addressing his actual Russia policies.

In a bid to preserve some of the INF Treaty’s safeguards, Putin immediately offered a moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe – a proposal swiftly rejected by both Trump and NATO. (Trump’s response was again duly ignored by Russiagate-crazed media outlets and politicians, for the obvious narrative inconvenience.)

Much like its refusal so far to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal – another critical security pact torn up by Trump — the Biden administration has thus placed itself in a dangerous geopolitical standoff rather than embrace diplomacy around proposals that US officials either deem as reality anyway (Ukraine not joining NATO) or that they were once party to (the Trump-sabotaged INF treaty).

NATO expansion, from the Cold War to a Ukraine coup

If the Biden administration is now willing to accept “real dialogue” over an outcome that “constrains US power” on the Ukraine-Russia border, it will have to eschew guiding US principles since the end of the Cold War.

When he agreed to the reunification of Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was “assured in 1990 that the [NATO] alliance would not expand,” Jack Matlock, Reagan and Bush I’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, recently noted. But upon entering office, Bill Clinton broke that pledge and began an expansion spree that has pushed NATO to Russia’s borders. In 2008 – against the reported advice of advisers including Fiona Hill – President George W. Bush backed a NATO declaration calling for Ukraine and Georgia’s eventual ascension.

The constant expansion of NATO has led to what the scholar Richard Sakwa calls a “fateful geographical paradox”: NATO, Sakwa says, now “exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

Sakwa’s maxim undoubtedly applies to Ukraine, where the threat of Russia’s neighbor joining a hostile military alliance sparked a war in 2014 that continues today.

The standard narrative of the origins of the current Ukraine crisis, as the New York Times recently claimed, is that Ukrainians revolted in street protests that ousted “pro-Russian leader” Viktor Yanukovych, “prompting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to order the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and instigate a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.” In reality, the US backed a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government and sabotaged opportunities to avoid further conflict.

The immediate background came in the fall of 2013, when the US and its allies pressured Yanukovych to sign a European Union association agreement that would have curtailed its ties to Russia. Contrary to how he is now portrayed, Yanukovych was not “pro-Russian”, to the point where he even “cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia,” Reuters reported at the time.

To sign the EU deal, Ukraine would have to accept the harsh austerity demands of the IMF, which had publicly criticized Ukraine’s “large pension and wage increases,” and “generous energy subsidies.” The agreement also contained a provision calling on Ukraine to adhere to the EU’s “military and security” policies, “which meant in effect, without mentioning the alliance, NATO,” as the late scholar Stephen F. Cohen argued.

The EU proposal, the New York Times observed in November 2013, was the centerpiece of its “most important foreign policy initiative”: an attempt to “draw in former Soviet republics and lock them on a trajectory of changes based on Western political and economic sensibilities.”

In the words of Carl Gershman, the then-head of the CIA-tied National Endowment for Democracy, “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” In Gershman’s fantasy, Ukraine’s entry into the Western orbit would redound to Russia as well. “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” he wrote. “… Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

Although it would have been a boon for DC neoconservatives, accepting the EU’s insistence on “increasing the retirement age and freezing pensions and wages” would have meant political suicide for Yanukovych. Putin capitalized by offering a more generous package of $15 billion in aid and gas subsidies, a deal that contained “no immediate quid pro quo for Russia,” the New York Times noted. To lure Yanukovych, Russia even dropped a proposal, opposed by Ukraine’s Maidan protesters, that Ukraine join a Russian-led customs union.

Putin’s Ukraine offer, the Times added, was one of “several foreign policy moves that have served to re-establish Russia as a counterweight to Western dominance of world affairs.” In the eyes of the Western domineers, the prospect of a Russian “counterweight” was an intolerable act. The US responded by ramping up support for the Maidan protests in Kiev and helping to sabotage an agreement with Yanukovych to hold new elections.

Any pretense that the US was acting as an honest broker was obliterated in early February 2014 when Russia released a recording of an intercepted a phone call between then-senior Obama official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. The US diplomats not only selected who would be Ukraine’s next Prime Minister — Arseniy Yatsenyuk – but decided to exclude their EU allies from the process. “Yats is the guy,” Nuland declared, before adding: “Fuck the EU.”

A major tipping point in the conflict came two weeks later, on February 20th, when nearly 50 Madain protesters were massacred by snipers. The Ukrainian opposition immediately accused government forces, sparking a series of events that led to Yanukovych’s flight from the country two days later. Exhaustive research by the University of Ottawa’s Ivan Katchanovski argues that the massacre was in fact “perpetrated principally by members of the Maidan opposition, specifically its far-right elements.”

Faced with the possibility of losing Russia’s most important naval base at Sevastopol to a US-backed coup regime, Putin responded by seizing the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Russia also provided military support to Ukrainians in the country’s Donbas region hostile to the new coup government, sparking an ongoing war between the opposing sides.

In Washington, the annexation of Crimea is widely seen as an expansionist act of aggression; even, according to Hillary Clinton, akin to “what Hitler did back in the 30s.” In Crimea, Russia had the support of the majority of the population, if polls are to be believed. The same for the Russian population, across the political spectrum. “For [Russian] politicians, not vocally supporting, let alone questioning, the annexation of Crimea is practically akin to political suicide – even for liberals,” a European Union think tank observed in 2014. Even “Anti-Putin nationalists… are enthusiastic backers of Putin’s territorial grab.” (For over 200 years Crimea had been a territory of Russia, until Nikita Khrushchev assigned it to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.)

A negotiated solution to the Donbas war has been in place since the signing of the Minsk II accords in 2015, as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has repeatedly stressed. The prospect of NATO expansion appears to be the pact’s main obstacle to implementation. Minsk II calls for granting autonomy to the Donbas region in return for its demilitarization. But Ukraine has “[refused] to guarantee permanent full autonomy for the Donbas”, Lieven writes, out of fear “that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership.”

In Lieven’s view, this could change with one critical shift: “If the United States drops the hopeless goal of NATO membership for Ukraine, it will be in a position to pressure the Ukrainian government and parliament to agree to a ‘Minsk III’ by the credible threat of a withdrawal of US aid and political support.”

War in Ukraine, profit in Washington

As a result of the US drive for yet another NATO-aligned military outpost on Russia’s borders, Ukraine has been decimated. The war in the Donbas has left nearly 14,000 dead. Ukraine’s “conflict with Russia,” Denys Kiryukhin of the Wilson Center observes, is one of the major factors that “accounts for the mass outmigration of Ukrainians since 2014.” The Donbas war has encouraged a rise in far-right militancy inside Ukraine, including the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has directly cooperated with the US military.

The United States’ European allies are also feeling the impact of Washington’s entanglement with Russia over Ukraine. The current standoff is threatening Russia’s energy exports, which account for about one-third of the European Union’s gas and crude oil use.

“It’s going to be an incredibly hard sell in any European country, to say that you have a 10 times higher energy bill and we feel as though our supply is not plentiful enough, because of Ukraine,” Kristine Berzina of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, a US and NATO-funded think tank, told Axios.

The picture is much rosier for those living through the war from Washington.

“You’ve got a lot of people who see profit in this conflict… and that’s the arms industry,” retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor, a senior Pentagon advisor under Trump, told me in a recent interview. “And the defense industrial complex sees this as an opportunity to spend a great deal of money on a whole range of armaments that they otherwise might not be able to sell.”

The arms industry has made no secret of its enthusiasm for the opportunities of NATO expansionism and the post-Maidan Ukraine market.

US arms manufacturers “stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate approves NATO expansion,” the New York Times reported in March 1998. Accordingly, these arms manufacturers have made “enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington.” At the time, the “chief vehicle” for their cause was a group called the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. The group’s president, Bruce L. Jackson, carried out double duty: by day, the Times observed the previous year, “he is director of strategic planning for Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s biggest weapons maker.”

As Andrew Cockburn of Harper’s noted in 2015, Jackson’s committee was firmly bipartisan, ranging “ideologically from Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle… to Greg Craig, director of Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense and later Barack Obama’s White House counsel.” (Craig later became embroiled in a Ukraine corruption scandal, though he was acquitted on all charges.) Explaining his committee’s staying power in Washington, Jackson told Cockburn: “‘Fuck Russia’ is a proud and long tradition in U.S. foreign policy. It doesn’t go away overnight.”

Nor do the profits that result. Reporting in July 2017 that military stocks had reached “all-time highs,” CNBC noted that “NATO concerns about Russia are seen as a positive for the defense industry.”

So is the ongoing war in Ukraine, where the US has shipped $2.7 billion in weapons since 2014, along with 200,000 pounds of fresh “lethal aid” in recent weeks and more promised via new spending bills.

US government officials across the spectrum routinely laud these weapons shipments as “critically needed, congressionally approved military aid” to a “very fragile country fighting Russian aggression” (Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, speaking on Democracy Now! in 2019).

Putting aside the guiding imperial and profit-driven motives, the main impact of pouring US military hardware into the Donbas conflict is to prolong it. Writing in Foreign Policy, two analysts with the Pentagon-tied think tank Rand Corporation, Samuel Charap and Scott Boston, argue that “The West’s Weapons Won’t Make Any Difference to Ukraine.” The “military balance between Russia and Ukraine is so lopsided in Moscow’s favor,” they write, that more new weapons from Washington “would be largely irrelevant in determining the outcome of a conflict.”

The authors also dispel another widely accepted bipartisan myth, that the US has been helping Ukraine resist “Russian aggression.” In reality, Russian-backed militants in the east “are mainly armed with small arms and light weapons, along with some artillery and Soviet-era armor.” Although Russsia has armed and trained its Donbas allies, “Ukraine has mainly not been fighting Russia’s armed forces” there. Instead, “the vast majority of rebel forces consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.” The Russian military has “never used more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities against the Ukrainians,” with major military components, such as Russia’s air force, “[not] involved in the fighting at all.”

The authors also remind their US audience of another overlooked reality: the costs of a full-blown war in Ukraine “will be disproportionately borne by Ukrainians.” Should an insurgency develop, as the Biden administration is mulling, the conflict will reach a stage where “thousands—or, more likely, tens of thousands—of Ukrainians will have died.”

Those promoting such an outcome have made clear that they value NATO expansion and the attendant arms industry windfall over the lives of Ukrainians, Russians, and any others placed in the crossfire. The Biden administration can avoid ending many more lives if it can interrupt hegemony and war profiteering for a different set of principles.

January 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO training for nuclear strikes against Russia – Moscow

RT | January 27, 2022

NATO is developing the capacity for devastating nuclear strikes against Russia – which includes involving members of the alliance who don’t have such weapons in training operations – Moscow’s top arms control official has claimed.

In an interview with TASS on Thursday, Vladimir Yermakov, Director of the Department of Arms Control and Nonproliferation in the Russian Foreign Ministry, said that the US was in the process of modernizing its atomic capabilities in Europe and had deployed missiles in the territories of several other member states.

“According to expert analysis, there are five non-nuclear NATO countries holding around 200 American B61 nuclear bombs,” Yermakov stated. “There is also the infrastructure to support the operational deployment of these weapons, which are capable of reaching Russian territory and striking a wide range of locations, including strategic ones.”

The director emphasized that while the missiles are controlled by Washington, the nuclear development is a collaborative effort. “There are ‘joint nuclear missions’ between NATO countries, in the course of which non-nuclear members of the alliance take part in training sessions to develop American nuclear capabilities against us,” he claimed.

Yermakov also said that the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Europe is one of Moscow’s primary goals in ongoing security negotiations.

“We are adamant that NATO’s ‘joint nuclear missions’ must immediately be halted, all American nuclear weapons must return to US territory, and the infrastructure that enables its swift deployment be liquidated,” he commented, saying that these proposals were included in the list of security demands that Moscow delivered to Washington in December.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed disappointment in the American response to the proposals, saying that the US had refused to make concessions concerning the expansion of NATO in eastern Europe. “The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the east and the deployment of highly-destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation,” the diplomat explained.

January 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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