Public Comment

It is a sad day for progressives when Barbara Lee votes for a 40 billion dollar Ukrainian aid supplement to the military budget and Josh Hawley votes against it.

It is tempting to be moralistic about the war in Ukraine, to view one side as all evil and the other as all good. This is to ignore the complex history of the region, both long term (for example, Crimea was part of Russia for centuries, and only in 1954 had its administrative status changed from an independent soviet socialist republic to being assigned to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic by the Ukrainian Khrushchev, and ever since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union had been agitating for a referendum about its status) and short term since the 2014 US-supported overthrow of a legitimately elected Ukrainian government less than a year before scheduled elections.

If the US aim is to defend freedom and the US from dictators, we should be invading Saudi Arabia where the 9-11 bombers came from. Instead we have Biden asking for increased oil production from the Saudi prince who chopped up a journalist who dared to criticize him. Biden and Blinken talk about the absolute sovereignty of every country and its ability to act however it likes, independent of any other country, yet this is given the lie by our involvement in the Western Hemisphere, most recently in Venezuela, in Chile, in Iran-Contra events, in the invasion of Granada,in Haiti and in support of right wing rule in Central America that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands including the archbishop of El Salvador, Saint Oscar Romero.  

Note must also be taken of the outrage with which Australia and the US have greeted the announcement of China using the Solomon Islands –1200 kilometers from Australia—as a ship base, with unspecified military action being threatened. What happened to the right of any country to join any alliance it wished to join and to carry any weapons it wants to (see Cuban missile crisis)?  

Sweden and Finland state that they will leave open the option of basing nuclear weapons in their country, yet we are engaged in measures short of war to prevent Iran from doing the same. Again the US comes with unclean hands and a selective imposition of international rules. Of course, progressives are all too familiar domestically with this kind of selective imposition of rules. 

gThe argument for inviolability of borders was given the lie by Kosovo, however justified that parceling out may seem, and of course by the ongoing slow swallowing up of the West Bank by Israel. Putin differs only in the crudity of his methods and in that there are already Russians in the place where he is invading. Blinken, who has not seen a foreign invasion he has not supported, argues for the indivisibility of Ukraine and Crimea, yet he was one of the authors of the Biden proposal to divide Iraq into three regions. Why are US troops in Syria, uninvited by anyone other than rebels who include Al Qaeda? In short, the US also comes with unclean hands from this perspective. 

It is a puzzle to determine why the US, or at least a triumphant cabal in the State Department, has maintained enmity to Russia since 1989 as if Communism has not ended. The book Not One Inch: America, Russia and the making of Post-Cold War Stalemate documents how Russia’s efforts to join a Europe-wide security arrangement, apparently so successful with the 1995 Balkan crisis when, under the auspices of Partnership for Peace, Russian forces worked alongside NATO troops, were ultimately thwarted by this State Department cabal, and by Clinton’s fear of appearing weak when challenged by Republicans (repeating a century-old pattern of overreaction by Democrats), and by his inability to control his hormonal urges. 

Yes, Russia is now a dictatorship behind an electoral façade. Yet we deal with other dictatorships without the urge to paint them as devils (see list of Middle East nations recently toured by Biden). Barack Obama acknowledged that there are no vital American interests in Ukraine and that Russia has a legitimate interest in what happens there. 

It is a tragic outcome of the impeachment of Trump that it became an unquestioned assumption that the US had a vital interest in Ukraine and that defense of the US starts with the defense of Ukraine. The Munich analogy used to argue for US action is the most overused analogy in US foreign affairs, used to justify domino theories and disastrous interventions from Vietnam to the Americas to the Middle East to Europe. It is as if the foreign policy establishment has learned only one piece of history, like a physician who learned only one diagnosis. 

From a larger perspective it is also a puzzle why an economic rivalry with China has become so militarized, when it should remain a rivalry of economics and influence. The only ones to gain are the military-industrial complex. 

So what is to be done? The worst thing possible is to prolong the conflict, to fight to the last Ukrainian. What should be done is to negotiate now. As Trump (yes, Trump, and one hopes progressives do not reflexively oppose this because Trump supports it), Kissinger (yes, the supporter of butchery in Indonesia, Chile and Vietnam; yet a close student of European relations) and Noam Chomsky agree, Ukraine will not go back to what it was before 2014. 

Some elements of an agreement are clearly visible. Crimea will remain Russian (as it has for centuries except for the period 1991-2014) and more autonomy will be granted to Eastern Ukraine than in the failed Minsk agreements. There is a precedent for neutrality in the decades-long situation of Austria and for increased autonomy for a region (see Basque provinces). The US will not like it and will try to sabotage this. 

What if there are no negotiations? Ukraine and Russian blood will continue to be shed – but that does not really matter for the US as it is not American blood. American military factories will boom as the economy is primed with bombs, not action against climate change. The two existential risks that the world faces will become more dire. Money will not be spent on fighting climate change but on fighting Russia and more fossil fuels will be used rather than less. The risk of a nuclear confrontation will increase as fighting continues, especially if Russia is pinned into a corner. These existential risks are why we need the Barbara Lee of 2003, not the Barbara Lee of 2022, and why we need to fight against the militarization of US foreign policy.