Deafness in Hubris: Ukraine Pays the Price of the West Not Listening

Credit/AP

Ashoak Upadhyay

E

ight days into Russia’s military excursion into hapless Ukraine, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) rejected the possibility of intervening against Russian forces, either on the ground or in the air; no troops to aid the beleaguered Ukrainian army no air support, said Jens Soltenberg, the secretary general of the alliance of 30 nations ranged supposedly to protect members or aspiring members against the former Soviet Union and now against Russia.

 

The ironies in that rejection, based as it is on the fear among chief members, France and Germany of being drawn into war with Putin’s Russia are deafening as they are tragic in their wrecking of illusions. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading for precisely such help from the alliance that he has been desperate to get his country admitted to. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader has been asking (threatening?) the NATO and Rusia’s neighbours, many of which on its western borders are already members of the alliance, to stay off. The NATO has heard both: it has listened to Russia.

Geopoliics, opportunism, realpolitik, common sense? Take your pick: But NATO has thrown Ukraine under the bus. And if you don’t like that then consider this: after more than two decades of deafness, it is listening to Russia. To stay off Ukraine; don’t get closer to our eastern border and the Black Sea!

 

It need not have come to this; but the chronicle of war, as Chris Hedges points out was foretold. And it was an outcome of deafness and hubris on the part of the West particularly the United States as leader of the western alliance. That story of deafness, of missed opportunities for an elimination of the Cold War tensions and discourse of hegemonic muscle-flexing, emerges from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. In early February 1990, then President of the US, George H. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker struck a deal with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: the Soviets who had the veto power, would allow the unification of the two Germanys on the condition that the NATO would not expand “ ‘one inch eastward’ “ as Blake Fleetwood quotes Secretary Baker from documents.declassified in 2017.

“At this point with Russia in chaos and its nascent democracy and free market was just emerging.  They needed help. The U.S. could have entered into a real Marshall Plan arrangement, as we did after World War II with our enemies, Germany and Italy.  This plan could have included Russia and all of the Eastern Bloc and offered an opportunity for a long standing partnership to nurture the roots of democracy and capitalism in the region.”

The German unification went through. The American administration kept its side of the bargain not to expand the NATO eastward during the Bush regime even though hardliners like Wolfowitz were pushing for that expansion. But the next President, Bill Clinton was ready to break the promises made. Hubris was raising its ugly head : in 1994, at the NATO conference in Brussels, Clinton formally inaugurated the Partnership for Peace program calling it a:

“track that will lead to NATO membership” and that “does not draw another line dividing Europe a few hundred miles to the east”.

Russia too was included in 1994 into the Partnership; it was never considered for NATO membership. Boris Yeltsin pleaded; he was ignored, derided. The process of inducting former Warsaw Pact (Soviet bloc) members from the Partnership Program into the NATO, commencing with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic began almost immediately. Alarm bells sounded in Washington’s elite circles. George Keenan “the dean of American scholars of Russia” mused that this would be the start of a new Cold War. He believed that this expansion of NATO based on the betrayal of a strategic promise would damage America’s efforts to turn Russia into a friend. By 2020, 14 former Soviet bloc members had been admitted to NATO. Ukraine was knocking on the doors.

 

As D.B. Venkatesh Varma, India’s former Ambassador to Russia writes (Indian express February 24)  “Each wave of NATO expansion brought the military alliance closer to Russia’s doorstep.”

Did the shame Russians felt at being excluded from NATO their failed state and miserable economic conditions, the pretenses of Glasnost, ridiculed leaders and low national esteem fuel Putin’s rise in 2000? Fleetwood seems to think so. And yet for the next seven years Putin remained relatively subdued, still reaching out to the US as Vladimir Pozner, an American-born Russian Journalist said in his speech at Yale University: How the United States Created Vladimir Putin.

Pozner is no fan of the Russian dictator but he shows how at every step in those seven years Putin’s attempts at building bridges, asking for membership to NATO, desperate to revive the economy and plagued by terrorism thought the two countries could confront religious extremism together. He was spurned. Russo phobia reigned not just among the neoconservatives but among partisan Democrats too. George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on WTC towers in New York City, directed the Pentagon to get cracking with new anti-ballistic missile systems in eastern European NATO members under the pretext of warding off threats from Iran.

 

Deafness, says Varma is the twin brother of hubris. Russia had no foreign policy in the late 1990s and early 2000s than “to be accepted by the West.” Then his patience ran out. In 2007 at the Munich Security Conference he made his last plea, remonstrating against the unwillingness of the US to listen and engage, reminding it of its promises not to expand NATO eastward.

The West did not listen; the following year at Bucharest Summit talks, NATO leaders went overboard in their enthusiasm for expansion; it welcomed Albania and Croatia into the alliance in the sixth round of expansion and held out hopes to Ukraine and Georgia, threw lollies at other ex-Soviet republics, inviting among others Montenegro for “intensified dialogues” among others, on security issues.

Russia was excluded, felt threatened. Was Ukraine comforted by the possibility of membership in an alliance with far off Europe serving its geopolitical/sovereign interests?

Tragically, with the refusal of NATO on the “no-fly zone” it is learning that distant protectors remain just that: far away.

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“Geopolitics is territorial genetics—it can be tamed but never erased” D.B. Venkatesh Varma

The history of the modern age would tempt us to accept Varma’s assertion; what else was the late nineteenth early twentieth but an endorsement of this idea as nation-states trampled over each other to assert their own violent sovereignties. The tragedy still unfolds. For this post-modern twentieth-first century that liberal gurus believed would usher in an age of universal democracy with the cessation of the Cold War and its super-power rivalries, has in fact been even more violent and as genocidal as the preceding centuries.

Territorial genetics have continued their violence on the powerless. NATO expands into the east European territories despite Russian pleas not to and in the former Yugoslavia’s Bosnia a, genocide, NATO airplane bombing on the hapless victims ushers in Islamophobia as a trope defining Europe’s newest (oldest?) Other. The age of pre-emptive wars was dawning and America/NATO were its pioneers, the military-industrial complex the largest beneficiaries. Soft power/diplomacy that seasoned diplomats such as George Keenan had recommended was viewed as a sign of weakness, for losers; besides it wasn’t profitable. And after 9/11 the killing fields of opportunity for Western (mainly American) “poligarchs” (to use John Keane’s phrasing for the unholy alliance of political and economic power) expanded enormously.

 

Air raid on Baghdad March 2003/Getty

 

Hedges’ apt reminder  in “The Greatest Evil is War”  that pre-emptive war, whether in Ukraine or Iraq, is a war crime should enable us to see through the fog of illusions, lies and propaganda that blow in from the capitals of the West. American/NATO operations in Iraq, Syria, Libya and most of all, Afghanistan were not the “shock-and-   awe” campaigns the American establishment and media termed them but invasions of a sovereign country. The campaigns were not wars on terror but wars of terror, to use the phrase comedian Sasha Cohen uses supposedly as a slip-up in the film, “Borat” when he tells a redneck audience at a rodeo show: “Can I say first, we support your War of Terror! May we show our support to our boys in Iraq!”

In 2012 then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to bomb Libya, “smart power” she called it, was a pre-emptive war whose results were disastrous because it turned Libya into a failed state and opened it to fundamentalist terrorism. This, despite the fact that its leader, Gaddafi had been complying with western pressure to open up his nuclear facilities to inspection; he too wanted to build bridges to the democratic West.

And Afghanistan? A twenty year war that has left the Afghan people devastated. Persistent attacks by American and NATO military might for two decades. Even during the tenure of the great scholar-administrator Barack Obama, not just Afghanistan but its neighbor Pakistan too bore the brunt of unceasing drone attacks. According to a study on the Costs of War by the Watson Institute at Brown University, USA:

“The United States military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, which resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties. From the last year of the Obama administration to the last full year of recorded data during the Trump administration, the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330 percent.”

 

The withdrawal of American troops ordered by President Biden was viewed by an uncritical media all around with approbation and dread at what the Taliban could do to the population. But in a shocking display of deafness and unbridled arrogance, the oldest democracy in the world took the decision in February to use the assets of the Afghanistan central bank, impounded when the Taliban seized power last August and stored in New York Federal Reserve Board vaults—$7 billion—for two purposes, unilaterally: Half of it to settle claims by families of American victims of 9/11 and the other half for unspecified efforts “for the benefit of the Afghan people.”

The morally and legally right thing to do would be to return those assets to the Afghan people: Noam Chomsky in early September (Noam Chomsky Weighs in on Afghanistan) among other things was clear the frozen assets should be returned to the Afghans. Since the US let the Taliban take formal power by withdrawing, it would have been the democratic and humanitarian thing to return the  assets to the central bank that was designed and set up with the help of American economists who say, per reports that it is still independent of the Taliban

As The Intercept noted:

Seizing the central bank funds has brought economic activity to a standstill. People have lost access to money held in banks. Government workers and teachers are going without paychecks. Importers have no access to capital to front the imports. Exporters similarly can’t access capital to keep their businesses operating. The currency, the afghani, has collapsed in value, and inflation is much steeper in Afghanistan than the rest of the world as a result.

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“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them” George Orwell in 1984

 

Serbia’s actions in Bosnia, the US/NATO invasion of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan,and many other pre-emptive wars in Latin America not to mention the overthrow of  democratically elected leaders  in Iran in the fifties, Salvador Allende in Chile in the seventies: Should one say they are of a piece with what Russia is doing in Ukraine? Some widld-eyed radicals may say so; the liberals will not; neither will they remember. Language, God’s gift to Adam to name things also obfuscates. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are legitimized as the search for “weapons of mass destruction” and “Islamic” terrorism even though we have learnt of the mass destructions heaped on the population and that no such weapons were found, the displacements that have caused untold tragedies and perversely, stoked Islamophobia even in countries like India .

But liberal opinion and discourse around the world does not view such actions as invasions or  they see such pre-emptive wars as actions combating evil (the “axis of evil” remember?); they see the outcomes of the American wars of terror on sovereign nations not as invasions because of double think in which militarized violence is “shock and awe” or “smart force” because it is spearheaded by democracies that value free speech and a media that is ostensibly not cowed down but has become what Lenin once called “useful idiots” part of the hegemonising force of post-modern imperialism. We can go a step further and say that Orwell’s doublethink does not capture this reality of illusion and the possible weaponisation of language as much as Humpty Dumpty’s reply to Alice in Through The Looking Glass, that he can make words mean many different things and it all depends “which is to be master-that’s all.”

 

The world holds contradictory things and some like F. Scott Fitzgerald might even find it a salutary example of a brilliant mind. But in Mr. Humpty Dumpty’s vision, words acquire meanings that contain hierarchies often free of the utterer and can be sequestered for master-status or accord the same to anyone using them. Democracy can become a myth in the sense of a lie when American or Russian tanks roll into a foreign city and yet prove its mastery in human discourse; it can mean mass organized civil resistance as at Shaheen Bagh and become subordinated to the level of anti-nationalism, forming the core of a dominant discourse. It all depends which is to be master…

“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” said Francois de la Rouchefoucauld nearly four centuries ago and it still rings true as an apposite summation of our incapacities to peer through the mists of illusions and lies to seek truths that would help determine our actions and thoughts about the sources of violence in our world.

 

War is the greatest evil, and preemptive war a crime against humanity; whether Russia was deceived with promises not to expand NATO an “inch eastward” persistently broken or the war on Iraq, Afghanistan by the western powers based on lies and fabrications about the sources of “terror” and weapons of mass destruction; its victims will judge them as invasions, not as operations to usher in democracy.

As Malalai Joya, Afghan activist and writer reminded us apropos her benighted country: ”Democracy never comes by the barrel of a gun, or by cluster bombs.”

Its only right that liberals all over the world express condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; but to remain silent about the wars launched to bring “democracy” hy the barrel of guns and drone strikes is to become complicit observers of crimes against humanity; more, to pave the way for future transgressions by power hungry despots, elected or otherwise.

While pundits fill our ears with the strategic and tactical fallouts of the invasion, listen to the grasshoppers and sounds of heavy and despairing footsteps heading for safe regions across the Ukrainian border to the West. Two million and counting; the UNCHR estimates the flow at 4 million soon. The small country of Moldova, a NATO member seeks assistance from the USA as 120,000 refugees tread over its borders. True, there’s a welcoming emotion partly based on the idea of helping those fair-haired and blue-eyed victims. But if the refugees do not move on westward, bonhomie in the eastern regions already strained by bloated defense budgets, corruption and oligarchic regimes, may turn sour. What chance that the western Europe members, or for that matter, USA that has returned to assume leadership over NATO after years of France and Germany seeking that mantle, will help members such as Hungary, Poland with anything other than more weapons of mass destruction? Why else were they inducted into the NATO?

 

It is too early to say how this war will end or when, despite pundits pointing to one possibility or the other scenario, mostly salivating on its deleterious impact on Russia and Putin. Stick to the ground and smell the fear. In a world strained of resources and racked by the pandemic, slower growth, rising unemployment, pervasive and pernicious insecurity breeding non-state violence and now the sanctions,

State-fueled hubris, the refusal to listen and the wars of terror that the sanctions will now unleash will continue to extract a heavy price: No prizes for guessing who will pay. Let’s just recall the fact that twenty years ago two senior officials resigned in protest against the devastating impact on the civilian populations of UN sanctions of sanctions on Iraq.

Listen to the grasshopper:

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism, or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”- Mahatma Gandhi

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--Chris Hedges: The Greatest Evil is War here
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/
--Blake Fleetwood: https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/not-one-inch-eastward-how-the-war-in-ukraine-could-have-been-prevented-decades-ago/
--Watson Institute: International and Public Affairs: Costs of War.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan

Also read Padmaja Challakere on Afghanistan
https://www.thebeacon.in/2021/09/10/in-afghanistan-the-tyranny-of-corruption-and-burdened-legacy/