U.S. heading for its “Suez” moment

— Both parties collude to drive the country into war(s) it cannot win. —

As we have learned nothing from the mass bamboozlement that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, everyone and her brothers are obediently mouthing the security state’s declarations that Russia wants to invade Ukraine. This faith in the mouthpieces of our armament industries’ monetary interests is touching; plus, the believers in this Revealed Truth from our masters can go to bed mocking the conspiracists and nutters of the [choose one] blue/red team, which no doubt is very calming.

Our president and his national security team say that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine. What happens in a few weeks if no such invasion occurs? Will Biden et al. claim that they faced down the weak-kneed Russkies successfully by a vigorous combination of finger-wagging, solemn assurances, and threats to cut off Vladimir Putin’s allowance? Perhaps an emergency measure to send another $50 billion over to the Pentagon will get hustled through a suddenly unified Congress.

Meanwhile, the Russians’ demand to revamp the security architecture in Europe, including a NATO retreat from its borders, goes unanswered. Perhaps that is the idea—distract with a non-existent threat and escape the pressure to get serious about negotiations.

If so, it won’t do much but postpone the inevitable, which is straight for a “Suez moment.”

The destruction unleashed by World War 2 ended European colonialism and the long primacy of Britain and France in world affairs. Their postwar decline became painfully clear to both the old bwana powers when Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956.

Britain, France, and Israel thought they could march in and reverse Nasser’s decision to claim control over a piece of Egyptian territory. But Eisenhower, for a variety of reasons, told the invaders to go home and backed up his suggestion with threats of economic sanctions that none of the three could afford. They obeyed. It was a sign of who had emerged stronger from the war and which countries were barely intact.

Suez, as became clear later, was “the last fling of the imperial dice,” at least as far as Britain and France were concerned. (Israel, meanwhile, continues the tradition in a new form.) Britain’s prime minister Anthony Eden was forced out two months later as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. relegated the rest of the world to the role of chorus.

Our current bosses are hurtling toward a similar rude awakening despite the array of shiny armaments at the disposal of our top-heavy military establishment. Aside from successful invasions of tiny Caribbean islands (Grenada) or devastating bombing runs over defenseless troops with no air cover (Iraq), it’s hard to identify any significant U.S. military success in decades with the possible exception of the smashing of the ISIS franchise in Iraq with the help of the hated Iranians and their local allies.

No one doubts that Americans can destroy cities and reduce whole countries to rubble, but direct combat of the sort being contemplated is another animal entirely. The parade of failed generals now hibernating comfortably on defense-contractor corporate boards might attest to that.

Whether in Ukraine on the Taiwan Straits, U.S. policymakers are in the grips of delusion.

Does anyone doubt that Russian troops fighting on their own frontiers would have a massive psychological motivation that might be lacking among NATO’s untested soldiers? Does anyone really mean to find out?

Should we doubt the nationalistic fervor that would drive however many millions of soldiers the Chinese might set to work on reclaiming Taiwan? Is it worth accumulating heroic war stories to learn the answer?

We have lived for many years under the assumption that neither of those countries would dare to confront the United States given the arsenals of nukes that stand ready to rain down upon them. If one listens to the statements coming out of Beijing and Moscow, however, one gets quite a different impression: that the two powers feel directly threatened NOW and are willing to call the Americans’ bluff.

Does Washington’s policy elite really want to get into a nuclear showdown over an island 10,000 miles away or a failed state in the middle of Europe?

(Incidentally, watch any mainstream news about Ukraine and ask yourself how often the Russians are quoted offering their views on what is happening, should happen, or how to defuse the situation. Of course, all U.S. news is fair and balanced—between Republican Americans and Democrat Americans.)

According to some of those, escalation up to and including World War III is just what we need. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker said in early December the U.S. should consider “first-use nuclear action” staged from the Black Sea. 

In case we think such nutters are only found in the GOP, Wicker was joined by Evelyn N. Farkas, a Pentagon official during the Obama administration, who advocates “readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.” Minor issues like attempts to undermine the outcome of a presidential election fade into irrelevancy when the two sides link arms, cast their gaze toward foreign enemies, and rattle nuclear sabers.

This is a dangerous game, and yet the assorted neocons that populate the U.S. foreign policy apparatus march in lockstep, confident that U.S. domination of the world over the last 75 years—and especially the last 30—is destined to continue indefinitely. They seem not to notice that our country is profoundly weakened by internal divisions, stripped of its industrial base, run by Sovietesque gerontocrats who rule a populace who believe in very little of what they say and even less of what they do.

Underlying the strategic myopia of what renegade CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank Complex), sometimes called “The Blob,” is a philosophical view of geopolitics and indeed of humanity itself that rejects any possibility of cooperative coexistence among the peoples of the world. The concept that China and Russia might be allowed to pursue their interests in relative peace and that a modus vivendi might be reached among all the heavily armed world powers to tackle other urgent global problems makes no appearance in the encyclopedic textbooks of their incestuous think tanks.  

No doubt such zero-sum thinking has been the norm for millenia of human history, the motivation for its endless destructive wars and periodic bouts of pitiless slaughter. Therefore, with such encouraging outcomes, we should keep doing the same thing?

We, or at least they, seem to think that nothing has changed since ancient times when the Romans cast about constantly to see where the natives might be getting restless and sent out punitive patrols to rein them in, kill a few thousand, and restart the flow of tribute. They feared allowing their subjects any real independence or permitting encroachments into the empire’s far-flung territories by rivals. That’s how Washington thinks. They speak as if failure to dominate means being dominated as if the world were a vast international S&M dungeon with no room for “vanilla” behavior of any kind.

While rival blue and red camps brawl in Congress and soon will do so on the streets as well, a curious unanimity prevails between them when facing the prospect of disobedient foreign actors flexing their local muscles. Democrats and Republicans alike hasten to undermine presidents who fail to maintain a properly belligerent attitude toward our official enemies; this applies to both Trump and Biden and especially to the permanent foreign policy/ security apparatus that surrounds them.

The only danger to our blobiferous MICIMATT parallel state is the frightening idea that peace may break out and obviate the need for more trillions deposited at the Pentagon for distribution among friendly industries and lobbyists.

The incapacity of our leadership to contemplate any approach other than intimidation and demands for obedience is not merely a function of narrowness of vision or Beltway groupthink, though these are real enough. It is also the expression on the world stage of our 40-year surrender to the neoliberal article of faith that markets, and markets alone, must determine our course of action in all spheres of life.

Such ideological enslavement gave cover to the titans of financial power and their friends in elite circles such that when they acted to make themselves immensely rich at the expense of most everyone else, they could convince themselves they were being smart. Did the greed come first or the ideas justifying it? Does it matter?

Did Bill Clinton really believe his own rhetoric that inviting China into the World Trade Organisation and enabling the Chinese Communist Party to set millions of wage slaves in competition with the American industrial heartland would convert China into a democratic capitalist imitation of ourselves? Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. The industrialists and financiers drooling over the profit opportunities offered by crushing U.S. workers were all too happy to pretend to believe it whether they did or not. No one paused to consider the long-term consequences because the quarterly profit statements were rosy, and that is enough because Markets.

Do members of Congress really think the U.S. needs to escalate war fever against Russia and China, or do their role as recipients of legal bribes from the MICIMATT dictate their shared worldview? Northrup Grumman doesn’t care.

We have gone so far down this road that the system is incapable of righting itself. Biden, the product of a lifetime of toadying to these corporate cowboys and parroting their justifications, is the perfect expression of our decadent and paralyzed state.

It is my belief that the U.S. will continue down the confrontational precipice with its two rivals and, in one form or another, sooner or later, lose, either little by little or all at once. I expect this process will take no more than five to seven years and that we will wake up by the end of the decade as no longer the world’s preeminent power.

The shock of taking our new place as the chastised victims of our leaders’ hubristic overreach will be something to behold and to experience. Once accomplished, a stimulating discussion about where we want to go next will be possible for the first time in living memory.

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Kazakstan: Two (and a half) views

The coverage of recent events in Kazakstan falls roughly into two camps:

•          People rose up against a dictatorial, corrupt regime and were mowed down by the country’s brutal security forces, assisted and backstopped by Russian troops.
•          Foreign intelligence services cooked up an attempted “color revolution” to install a West-friendly regime in Kazakstan, threaten Russia along a huge central Asian border, and simultaneously break up the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative.

At the risk of sounding like a Christian Democrat, I propose that both are partly true, and therefore each is incomplete.

Having seen a bit of life in the post-Soviet republics up close, I am immediately pre-disposed to think that demonstrations, riots, street fighting, and even the seizure of government buildings reflect pent-up anger and frustration among the populace at decades of blatant corruption among the self-serving elites along with the elites’ failure to address basic issues of survival and well-being for the majority, even in countries pulling in vast amounts of ready cash (e.g., Kazakstan, Azerbaijan, both oil producers). In my experience, these countries tend to operate on the assumption that state officeholders are nothing more than members of an organized mafia whose sole purpose is mutual enrichment and that no government function is to be performed in the absence of a bribe. 

My immediate apologies to long-suffering, honest bureaucrats in any of those countries—I’m sure you exist, and it can’t be an easy life.

If those are the terms, many citizens will patiently accede to them given the unlikelihood of gaining anything by not doing so. However, the implied exchange is that the state will function, keep a lid on the more grotesque forms of lawlessness, and make it possible to live modestly day to day if one has no particular ambitions beyond an adequate lunch. 

Something like a 100% increase in the price of fuel, then, blasts this social contract apart, and it should hardly surprise us that spontaneous and even violent outbursts followed when the Kazakstani authorities imposed it.

In such a case, one would expect to see clashes with cops, perhaps demonstrations that cannot be controlled, masses of people surrounding key government buildings, and, depending on how many firearms are circulating, a few potshots and casualties. Depending on how scared the regime is, deaths might amount to a handful (as in Chile’s demonstrations in recent years or several hundred (as in Myanmar, given the extreme unpopularity of the military coup-makers there).

What one would not expect in this scenario is news of armed bands attempting to seize the main airports, successfully in one case, especially if they appear to be well prepared and well supplied with small arms, logistical capabilities, and manpower. Nor would you expect the chief of national security, Karim Massimov, to order a pullback by airport defenders just hours before the assault takes place, as he is accused of doing. That is where the long-suffering-people-mowed-down-by-murderous-cops scenario doesn’t provide an adequate explanation.

There is enough evidence, even at this early stage, to suggest that popular unrest was utilized to unleash a deadly power struggle at the top of the very top-heavy Kazak ruling class. According to some knowledgeable observers, the two camps are, or were: a pro-Russian one represented by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and a Kazakophile-but-West-friendly tendency long dominated by former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, the erstwhile power behind the Kazak throne, so to speak.

Nazarbayev, while fulfilling all the clichés about Central Asian autocrats from the personality-cultish naming of the new capital after himself to his supposed plan to have his daughter Nariga inherit the presidency, also tilted quite noticeably in the direction of western oil companies and the governments that stand behind them. Nazarbayev, like Lukashenko in Belarus, attempted to balance the two hostile camps to extract maximum concessions from each. In our increasingly war-ready world, this turns out not to be a winning strategy.

Many accusations are flying over what and who exactly were involved in the two-day uprising, which probably put Tokayev’s life in danger and could shorten those of others. There will be ample opportunity to sort through the claims and accompanying evidence or lack of same. For now, we can keep in mind that the U.S. and its spook allies in Britain, perhaps Turkey, are entirely comfortable with utilizing all sorts of dubious and bloodthirsty elements, including the same jihadis whom we are supposedly at “war” with, to advance their immediate aims. We don’t know if they did, but we know that they would.

At the same time, it would be nice to hear—from those enthusiastic about the Russian role in suppressing the alleged coup—some occasional acknowledgement of the legitimate grievances of the Kazakstani people who have had no role in the governance of their country since the moment of its creation. If the Kazak elites had provided even the slightest opportunity for a democratic airing of grievances, they might have thought twice about ramming through a policy that threatened people’s survival and about how the average Kazakstani might react. A little democracy might have prevented the outbreak of deadly power games costing dozens of lives.

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Will Russia invade Ukraine? Yes, if they so choose.

 

After the collapse of the USSR, foreign policy senior wise man George Kennan warned against expanding NATO east toward the borders of Russia, calling it a “fateful error.” Kennan, who coined the term “containment,” which became the shorthand name for U.S. policy toward the USSR for decades, said that the crumbling of Soviet ideology could have led the new country in a positive direction. But providing its leaders with a new external enemy, he said, would “erode the nascent democracy.”

Kennan’s writings and comments in the late 1990s criticizing the expansion of NATO—which occurred in eight stages over 70 years such that the military alliance now comprises 30 countries—are full of dire predictions. Let’s see how many have come true:

NATO expansion, said Kennan, will:

. . . “inflame nationalistic, anti-western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Check.

. . . “restore the atmosphere of cold war to east-west relations.” Check.

“. . . have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy.” Check.

“. . . impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Check.

In summary, said Kennan, “We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” Check.

The last statement is the one looming large over the several meetings Biden and Putin have held in recent weeks, including a call just a couple of days ago. A look at the map above shows what a juicy prize Ukraine would be as a front-line NATO member given the long border it shares with the new Evil Empire. Which Brookings intern wrote the memo assuring his fellow neocons that Russia would be okay with this?

If one squints one’s eyes and peers through the cloud of State Department/Pentagon/White House stenography emanating from our main news outlets, one can glimpse that poor old Joe is playing from a very weak hand. While issuing daily alarms over the Russkies’ nasty intentions toward Ukraine and warning it against taking military action, the U.S. can’t do anything much about a  Russian attack were it to occur and has said as much.

Experts largely agree that the Ukrainian military would collapse within hours of a Russian attack and that the Ukraine as a country might cease to exist. Impoverished refugees flooding toward the prosperous states of Europe is not a welcome scenario for the NATO allies, none of whom have a whit of influence over what the two big guys eventually decide to do in any case.

Biden and his spokespeople wave the threat of further sanctions against Russia were such an attack to take place, such as banning Russian banks from using the SWIFT messaging service to process financial transactions. To which the Russian response has been a version of “Oo, eek, we’re so skeered!”

German and Dutch leaders trying to keep their citizens from freezing this winter, on the other hand, might well be spooked by the prospect of losing easy access to Russian natural gas. Russia has plenty of customers in Asia for its products, and the Americans’ simultaneous campaigns against both it and China have thrown those two giants together in what is increasingly looking like a long-term partnership if not a downright alliance.

How did this come about? Are the Russians seeking to restore the czarist/Soviet empire and gobble up neighboring states? One would think so from the mainstream commentators showcased here.

Back to Kennan: “I think it is a tragic mistake,” he insisted in 1998. “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.”

On the Senate debate that occurred before that august body endorsed NATO expansion, Kennan said it was "superficial and ill-informed" and that he was "particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. 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 to remove it.”

Who were the authors of this colossal blunder? Bloodthirsty neocon warriors like those who gathered around Bush II? No, in fact it was Bill Clinton and William Cohen, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, egged on by Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman. That is, the reliably right-wing nutcases of the Republican Party boosting the most reactionary tendencies among the most war-loving Democrats. And our nation’s arms manufacturers no doubt were standing by with the needed lobbying and think-tank millions to encourage this scheme, so profitable for themselves.

Our media elites are incapable of injecting any balance into their reporting of the Ukrainian situation, which would at minimum include some nod to the Russians’ fear of encirclement by hostile military forces aiming nuclear weapons at their major cities with arrival times measured in the minutes. I recall a major international crisis of apocalyptic brinksmanship occurring in 1962 when the shoe was on the other foot.

Putin has made it clear in his public statements that the Russians are out of patience with NATO, with the U.S., and most particularly with the Ukrainians and are not in a forgiving mood. They have demanded written, legal guarantees not only that NATO will not expand further into Ukraine or anywhere else but to roll back the current status quo.

What’s different about this set of demands at this time is that the Russians are in a position to impose them. After all the NATO-inspired talk of military threats against Ukraine, the western powers are faced with a prophecy about to be self-fulfilled. Putin laid out their conditions for not acting and is not interested in verbal assurances given that the U.S. has proven itself not agreement-capable repeatedly (the Iran nuclear deal, various arms control treaties, Libya). The Russians say they are willing to talk but not forever, and by all appearances they are deadly serious.

There is a lot of speculation in the specialty press and blogosphere about what will happen, ranging from nothing to all-our war in Europe. All the scenarios are plausible, and nobody knows.

What is not in doubt is that the whole sorry mess could have been avoided if our leaders had opted for a different course 30 years ago. But that was impossible. Our political system and economy are so enslaved to the war-making industrial complex that belligerence and fear-mongering had to continue to drive U.S. attitudes toward the world because without them, many trillions of dollars might not continue to flow into the right pockets. 

Mr Kennan’s wise words never had a chance. Perhaps they will now that the chickens have come home to roost.

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