Ukraine
gave up its nuclear weapons and was attacked. Therefore every country
should have nuclear weapons.
NATO
didn’t add Ukraine, which was attacked. Therefore every country
or at least lots of them should be added to NATO.
Russia
has a bad government. Therefore it should be overthrown.
These
lessons are popular, logical — even unquestionable truth in
many minds — and catastrophically and demonstrably wrong.
The
world has had incredibly good luck and a ridiculously high number of
near misses with nuclear weapons. The mere passage of time makes
nuclear apocalypse extremely likely. The scientists who maintain the
Doomsday Clock say the risk is now greater than ever before.
Exacerbating it with even more proliferation only adds to the risk.
For those who rank the survival of life on Earth above any aspect of
what that life looks like (for you can waive no flag and hate no
enemy if you don’t exist) eliminating nuclear weapons has to be
a top priority, just like eliminating climate-destroying emissions.
But
what if every country that gives up nukes gets attacked? That would
be a steep price indeed, but it isn’t the case. Kazakhstan also
gave up its nukes. So did Belarus. South Africa gave up its nukes.
Brazil and Argentina chose not to have nukes. South Korea, Taiwan,
Sweden, and Japan have chosen not to have nukes. Now, it is true that
Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program and was attacked. And it is
true that numerous countries lacking nuclear weapons have been
attacked: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, etc.
But nuclear weapons don’t completely stop India and Pakistan
attacking each other, don’t stop terrorism in the U.S. or
Europe, don’t prevent a major proxy war with the U.S. and
Europe arming Ukraine against Russia, don’t stop a major push
for war with China, don’t prevent Afghans and Iraqis and
Syrians fighting against the U.S. military, and have as much to do
with starting the war in Ukraine as their absence does with failing
to prevent it.
The
Cuban missile crisis involved the U.S. objecting to Soviet missiles
in Cuba, and the USSR objecting to U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy.
In more recent years, the U.S. has abandoned numerous disarmament
agreements, maintained nuclear missiles in Turkey (and Italy,
Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium), and placed new missile bases in
Poland and Romania. Among Russia’s excuses for invading Ukraine
was the positioning of weaponry nearer its border than ever before.
Excuses, needless to say, are not justifications, and the lesson
learned in Russia that the U.S. and NATO will listen to nothing other
than war is as false a lesson as those being learned in the U.S. and
Europe. Russia could have supported the rule of law and won over much
of the world to its side. It chose not to.
In
fact, the United States and Russia are not parties to the
International Criminal Court. The United States punishes other
governments for supporting the ICC. The United States and Russia defy
the rulings of the International Court of Justice. The U.S.-backed
coup in Ukraine in 2014, the U.S. and Russian efforts to win over
Ukraine for years, the mutual arming of conflict in Donbas, and the
Russian invasion of 2021 highlight a problem in world leadership.
Of
18 major human rights treaties,
Russia is party to only 11, and the United States to only 5, as few
as any nation on Earth. Both nations violate treaties at will,
including the United Nations Charter, Kellogg Briand Pact, and other
laws against war. Both nations refuse to support and openly defy
major disarmament and anti-weapons treaties upheld by most of the
world. Neither supports the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons. Neither complies with the disarmament requirement of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the United States actually keeps
nuclear weapons in five other nations and considers putting them into
more, while Russia has talked of putting nukes in Belarus.
Russia
and the United States stand as rogue regimes outside the Landmines
Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the Arms Trade Treaty,
and many others. The United States and Russia are the top two dealers
of weaponry to the rest of the world, together accounting for a large
majority of weapons sold and shipped. Meanwhile most places
experiencing wars manufacture no weapons at all. Weapons are imported
to most of the world from a very few places. The United States and
Russia are the top two users of the veto power at the UN Security
Council, each frequently shutting down democracy with a single vote.
Russia
could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by not invading Ukraine.
Europe could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by telling the
U.S. and Russia to mind their own business. The United States could
almost certainly have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by any of the
following steps, which U.S. experts warned were needed to avoid war
with Russia:
Abolishing
NATO when the Warsaw Pact was abolished.
Refraining
from expanding NATO.
Refraining
from supporting color revolutions and coups.
Supporting
nonviolent action, training in unarmed resistance, and neutrality.
Transitioning
from fossil fuels.
Refraining
from arming Ukraine, weaponizing Eastern Europe, and conducting war
rehearsals in Eastern Europe.
Accepting
Russia’s perfectly reasonable demands in December 2021.
In
2014, Russia proposed that Ukraine align with neither the West nor
the East but work with both. The U.S. rejected that idea and
supported a military coup that installed a pro-West government.
According
to Ted
Snider:
“In
2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on a platform that featured
making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk Agreement. The Minsk
Agreement offered autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the
Donbas that had voted for independence from Ukraine after the coup.
It offered the most promising diplomatic solution. Facing domestic
pressure, though, Zelensky would need U.S. support. He did not get it
and, in the words of Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European
Politics at the University of Kent, he was ‘thwarted by the
nationalists.’ Zelensky stepped off the road of diplomacy and
refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk
Agreements.
“Having
failed to support Zelensky on a diplomatic solution with Russia,
Washington then failed to pressure him to return to the
implementation of the Minsk Agreement. Sakwa told this writer that,
‘as for Minsk, neither the U.S. nor the EU put serious pressure
on Kyiv to fulfill its part of the agreement.’ Though the U.S.
officially endorsed Minsk, Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on
Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
told this writer, ‘they did nothing to push Ukraine into
actually implementing it.’ The Ukrainians gave Zelensky a
mandate for a diplomatic solution. Washington did not support or
encourage it.”
While
even U.S. President Barack Obama opposed arming Ukraine, Trump and
Biden favored it, and now Washington has dramatically increased it.
After eight years of assisting the Ukrainian side in a conflict in
Donbas, and with branches of the U.S. military like the RAND
Corporation producing reports on how to get Russia into a damaging
war on Ukraine, the U.S. has refused any steps that might bring about
a ceasefire and peace negotiations. As with its eternal belief that
the President of Syria has been about to be overthrown any moment,
and its repeated rejections of peace settlements for that country,
the U.S. government, according to President Biden, favors the
overthrow of the Russian government, no matter how many Ukrainians
die. And the Ukrainian government seems to largely agree. Ukrainian
President Zelensky reportedly rejected
a peace offer days before the invasion on terms that will almost
certainly ultimately be accepted by those — if any — left
alive.
It’s
a very well kept secret, but peace is not fragile or difficult.
Getting a war started is extremely difficult. It requires a concerted
effort to avoid peace. The examples
that prove this claim include every past war on Earth. The example
most often raised in comparison with Ukraine is the Gulf War of
1990-1991. But that example depends on erasing from our
collective/corporate memory the fact that the Iraqi government was
willing to negotiate withdrawal from Kuwait without war and
ultimately offered to simply withdraw from Kuwait within three weeks
without conditions. The King of Jordan, the Pope, the President of
France, the President of the Soviet Union, and many others urged such
a peaceful settlement, but the White House insisted upon its “last
resort” of war. Russia has been listing what it would take to
end the war on Ukraine since before the war began — demands
that ought to be countered with other demands, not weaponry.
For
those who have time to learn the history and understand that peace is
perfectly possible, it may become easier to recognize the flaw in the
self-fulfilling idea that NATO must be expanded even if it threatens
Russia, and even if Russia attacks to prevent it. The belief that the
Russian government would attack anywhere it could get away with no
matter what, even if admitted into NATO and the EU, or even if NATO
were abolished, is unprovable. But we don’t need to consider it
wrong. It could very well be right. Certainly the same seems as
likely to be true of the U.S. and some other governments. But
refraining from expanding NATO would not have prevented Russia
attacking Ukraine because the Russian government is a noble
philanthropic operation. It would have prevented Russia attacking
Ukraine because the Russian government would have had no good excuse
to sell to the Russian elites, the Russian public, or the world.
During
the 20th Century Cold War there were examples — some of them
discussed in Andrew Cockburn’s latest book — of the U.S.
and Soviet militaries causing high-profile incidents just when the
other side was pursuing additional weapons funding from its
government. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has done more for NATO
than NATO could ever have done on its own. NATO’s support for
militarism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe in recent years has done
more for Russian militarism than anyone in Russia could have managed.
The idea that what’s needed now is more of what created the
current conflict amounts to confirming preconceptions in dire need of
being questioned.
The
idea that Russia has a bad government and should therefore be
overthrown is a horrible thing for U.S. officials to be saying.
Everywhere on Earth has a bad government. They should all be
overthrown. The U.S. government arms and funds almost all of the
worst governments in the world, and the easy first step of ceasing to
do that is highly to be encouraged. But overthrowing governments
without a massive popular and independent local movement unencumbered
by outside and elite forces is an endlessly proven recipe for
disaster. I’m still not clear what it is that rehabilitated
George W. Bush, but am old enough to remember when even occasional
news viewers had learned that overthrowing governments was a disaster
even on its own terms, and that the top idea for spreading democracy
would be to lead by example through trying it in one’s own
country.
