Capitalism, Democracy and the American Empire
Part V: The American Empire Uses NATO and Ukraine to Launch a Proxy War on Russia
The 21st century has seen the American empire dramatically accelerate its drive to colonize the entire world, and that drive has pulled its military machine right up to the doorstep of a nuclear-armed Russia.
Since its apex at the end of World War II, the US economy—and, therefore, the “global economy,” the worldwide capitalist system run by the US corporate elite—has been in gradually steepening decline. Nothing surprising about this decline insofar as capitalist systems are, by definition, in the business of exhausting natural resources for production purposes and uploading the wealth thereby produced by the working-class many to the capital-owning-class few: sooner or later, this capitalist process makes a society unable to purchase what its economy produces. Accordingly, the US government (USG) and its corporate oligarchs have had to expand to other (notably, in view of US history, black and brown) regions of the world whose resources, markets and labor could be exploited to continue the process. This capitalist expansion is otherwise known as imperialism, long since requiring the USG to militarize its economy (just as previously had the British and other European capitalist empires) in order to colonize overseas. And so, capitalist (like every other kind of historical) imperialism necessarily leads—as it has in the US and Europe—to internal economic decline and decay.
The American empire (aka “the global economy”) has finally reached the point of economic desperation in that the capitalist world has been looted to capacity, leaving only a handful of independent republics in the world to be pillaged and plundered. But this handful has been engaging in a global democratic resistance, and in so doing offering the rest of the world a way out of economic dependence on and enslavement to the American empire. Leading this resistance are the nuclear-armed Eurasian states of Russia and China, making them the chief targets of the USG and its European capitalist-militarist-imperial arm, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Prior to advancing on Russia (as a prelude to doing the same on China), the American empire grabbed the low-hanging fruit of central Asia (“the Middle East”), “liberated” by W. Bush’s anti-Muslim “War on Terror” (pronounced “terrer”). Which was precisely the neocon-intended outcome of 9/11 (see Part IV). While these imperial-corporate projects never work out precisely as planned, the war on the Muslims of central Asia did succeed in impoverishing a war-ravaged Afghanistan, corporatizing a war-ravaged Iraq, reducing Libya to a failed state with an unprecedented slave market, and destabilizing (i.e., starving the populations of) large swaths of northern Africa, nations surrounding Israel and, more recently, Syria. All of this paved the way for the long-planned assault on the two primary Eurasian targets (control of Eurasia long being recognized, as per British geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder’s renowned 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” the key to controlling the world).
The American empire has been conducting a gradually escalating propaganda war against both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation for well over a decade, information warfare (along with economic warfare in the form of sanctions) always serving as the imperial prelude to military warfare, which the empire has now brought to Russia via its twin European proxies: NATO and Ukraine.
NATO’s Encirclement of Russia
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Russia became an experiment in hardcore (i.e., body-and-soul-destroying) neoliberalism: the privatization of all public utilities and industries, resources and services, all exploited for profit by US corporations and the new class of Russian oligarchs they created; this was the American way on overdrive, the reversal of the original socialist Soviet system. Accompanying this ten-year looting (1991-2000) of the former Soviet economy was a six-year drop in Russian life expectancy, which went hand in hand with the economic immiseration of the working-class masses. And all done with the cooperation of the (anticommunist and frequently intoxicated) Russian president Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin’s predecessor and the last Soviet premier, (anticommunist) Mikhail Gorbachev, had been promised in 1990 by US President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker (perhaps with a wink), that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” toward Russia beyond the then-reunified Germany. Nevertheless, under Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, NATO began its steady and incessant march toward the European borders of Russia, landing on the Russian border in 1999 with the addition of Poland (which borders Russia via Kaliningrad, a Russian region near, but not directly connected to, the rest of Russia). The bordering states next to join NATO, under Clinton successor George W. Bush, in 2004, were Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (the latter also on the border of Kaliningrad). This brought the number of NATO states bordering Russia to five (including Norway, in 1949, one of the original NATO states, sharing a 126-mile border with Russia at Norway’s northeastern-most tip). As of 2023, with Finland’s addition to NATO, that number has reached six. (That each NATO member is required to purchase and deploy US-manufactured weapons that can be—and often are—aimed directly at Moscow may help to explain why the Russian Federation finds this unacceptable.)
The USG had hastened NATO’s encirclement of Russia shortly after the turn of the century. Vladimir Putin had replaced Boris Yeltsin as Russian president in 1999, initially with the support of the USG. The assumption of the US corporate elite was that Putin would (more soberly and competently than Yeltsin) continue the socially devastating neoliberal policies US corporate interests had used Yeltsin to impose on Russian society.
Vladimir Putin, however, had other plans.
Putin swiftly struck a balance of power with—and gradually gained the upper hand on—the US-corporate-enabled oligarchy that had arisen in Russia in the 1990s. His grip on power enabled his administration to rebuild Russian society, reindustrialize the Russian economy, renationalize major industries, and modernize the Russian military into an effective defense force (and in so doing achieve widespread popular support).
Under Putin, Russian military operations have been confined to defensive purposes. He deployed forces against Muslim-fundamentalist separatists (including terrorist elements) within the Russian republic of Chechnya (1999-2002), as well as against the border nation of Georgia (2008), the government of which had hoped that its oppression of ethnic-Russian Georgians would gain it entrance into NATO. (The same wish of the Ukrainian government contributed to its shelling of its ethnic-Russian population between 2014 and 2022.) The fact that characteristically warmongering, militarist US Senator John McCain had made public statements in support of both conflicts (and later appeared in footage urging anti-Russian operations in Ukraine) argues for the accuracy of Putin’s claim that anti-Russian CIA agitation precipitated both the Chechen and the Georgian conflicts (just as CIA meddling has even more obviously regarding the current Ukrainian conflict). Since 2015, Putin has also deployed airpower in defense of Russian ally Syria, thwarting the overthrow of the Syrian government of USG target Bashar al-Assad by jihadists, including ISIS (which the USG via the CIA had been arming against Assad).
How Putin Became “Hitler”
Since rising to power, Putin had sought friendly relations with the USG, the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU), but had been rebuffed at every turn, despite not having made any hostile moves toward any European nation (the function of NATO ostensibly having been to protect western Europe from alleged 20th-century Soviet, and now from alleged 21st-century Russian, “aggression”).
The unmitigated USG-NATO animus toward Putin was rooted in the fact that he had double-crossed the American empire, effectively thwarting the plan—begun so effectively, and lethally, during the 1990s—to colonize Russia: to incorporate its vast resources and markets into the imperial “global economy.” Putin had, thus, painted a red-white-and-blue target on his back. The US corporate elite and its European lackeys would now stop at nothing—from demonizing Putin as the newest “Hitler” via the US-UK-EU political-and-media-propaganda machine to lining up NATO missiles aimed at Moscow on the Russian-Ukrainian border—to remove him from power.
(The Russiagate scam—finally exposed beyond doubt as such by the May 2023 release of the Durham report—that began in 2016 not only served the purpose of rationalizing Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat by the political novice and reality-show personality Donald Trump, which was so easily explained by her ineptness and unlikability as a candidate, along with Obama’s failure to reverse neoliberal policies that immiserated the US working class during his administration; Russiagate also served to demonize Putin in the eyes of Democrats as the fiend responsible for Trump’s election, as if up to 50% of American voters were stupid enough to allow some fairly inept Russian bots to sway their votes; and as if all governments, especially the USG, don’t “interfere,” ineptly or not, in other governments’ elections on a regular basis. In any case, Putin became another name for Satan in the minds of American liberals.)
The American empire’s zeroing in on Putin took a decisive step forward in 2014, when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown via a coup centered in the Maidan Square of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Yanukovych had committed the unforgiveable sin of trying to maintain a position of neutrality between the Russian Federation (RF), on one hand, and the USG and its collective vassal, the EU, on the other. The new anti-Russian Ukrainian government that rose to power after the coup on Yanukovych had been handpicked by Obama Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland (arch-neocon wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan; see Part IV), a secret selection process that was caught on tape (accessible on YouTube and heard by many, until its inconvenient truth required its removal).
As of the Maidan coup of 2014, then, Ukraine ceased to be a sovereign national entity, becoming a vassal and, therefore, a tool of the American empire: more precisely, a battering ram to be used against Russia and, more specifically, against the government of Vladimir Putin.
The Start of the War in Ukraine
From 2014 until 2022, the Ukrainian coup government (with USG-NATO weaponry) systematically shelled eastern Ukraine (specifically, the Donbas region), killing roughly 15,000 ethnic-Russian Ukrainians (another documented fact conveniently forgotten, if not denied, by the western media). Many Ukrainian citizens of the Donbas had refused to be governed by the avowedly Russian-hating coup government of Ukraine, proclaiming themselves the independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and defending themselves with their own volunteer militias against the Ukrainian-government forces. The fighting during this eight-year period constituted, in effect, a Ukrainian civil war, pitting European-aligned western Ukraine and its USG-controlled coup-government against Russian-aligned eastern Ukraine and its revolutionary republics.
In that the Ukrainian military was being armed and trained by USG-NATO forces, then, the Russia-Ukraine War—more accurately described as the USG proxy war on Russia in Ukraine—started not in 2022 but in 2014.
(Proxy warfare occurs when a powerful government arms and otherwise aids another government [or non-governmental actors] in waging war against an enemy nation, without its own direct involvement. USG officials have publicly stated many times that the purpose of sending [now] billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine—all the while, as they don’t say, overflowing the already stuffed coffers of US arms manufacturers, as usual, at US taxpayers’ expense—is to equip the Ukrainian military to “bleed Russia,” to “weaken Russia,” to remove the “madman” Putin from power. To deny, then, that Ukraine is a USG proxy for its war on Russia would be laughable if not for the massive loss of Ukrainian lives and the utter wreckage to which Ukraine is being reduced. None of this, however, seems of concern to USG official spokespersons, including Joe Biden.)
The tools that the USG used to start (and continue) its Ukrainian proxy war against Russia have been an unremittingly violent and Russian-despising minority that had long been waiting for such an opportunity. The on-the-ground force that front-lined both the 2014 Maidan coup and the subsequent Ukrainian military assault on the Donbas were avowedly fascist (Nazi-tattoo-and-emblem-wearing) elements who have long been determined to rid Ukraine of any trace of Russian ethnicity and language. While western media sounded alarms about the Nazi presence in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022 (before western “journalists” came to see the secret value of Nazis serving USG interests), this fact has become another inconvenient truth that has been, to borrow from Orwell, memory-holed since Russian military operations in Ukraine began.
(The documented history of Nazi activity in western Ukraine goes all the way back to the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera—now a Ukrainian national hero—with Nazi Germany in its invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. It is a matter of public record that, in the aftermath of WWII, the CIA recruited—protecting them from punishment for their war crimes after WWII—and employed Nazis and other fascists to join in USG-sponsored anticommunist terrorism throughout Europe [see “Operation Gladio” and related post-WWII anticommunist CIA projects], incorporating these Nazi elements into NATO as well as into European secret paramilitary organizations. The CIA had been preparing, first, an anti-Soviet, and then, an anti-Russian Nazi force in western Ukraine ever since the end of WWII. That force has emerged—in all its heinous brutality—into the clear light of day since 2014 but remains conspicuously invisible in terms of mainstream western media coverage since 2022; and these human echoes of the real Hitler—not the large numbers of Ukrainian youth forced into combat—have been the primary targets of the Russian SMO.)
The Futility of Negotiations with the American Empire
After the USG-engineered, anti-Russian coup of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, the Ukrainian territory of Crimea (host to the only Russian naval base on the Black Sea, which abuts both Russia and Ukraine), held a status referendum regarding whether to remain under the Ukrainian coup government or to join the RF; unsurprisingly, in that the vast majority of Crimeans (like those of the Donbas) are ethnic Russians, Crimea elected, by a 97% vote (with 83% voter turnout), to join the RF. In 1996, Crimea had become the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (stipulated in the Ukrainian Constitution), its autonomous status presumably allowing it to determine of which nation it would be a part (just as, ironically/hypocritically, the US political-and-media establishment insists that Taiwan—even minus a similarly official autonomous status—has the right to do regarding independence from China, of which Taiwan is an undisputed offshore province); nevertheless, the Ukrainian coup government, with full USG support, insists on its right to reclaim Crimea as its own, albeit against the democratic wishes of the vast majority of Crimean citizens. (While the Crimean vote to join Russia was predictable given the ethnicity of its citizens, the RF also had a keen interest in Crimea in that the Russian naval base on the Black Sea would have been forfeited to NATO and used against Russia had Crimea remained in Ukraine.)
Starting in 2014, negotiations to end the civil war were ongoing between the Ukrainian coup government and the RF, mediated by Germany and France. The result was the Minsk accords (named after the capital city of Belarus, in which negotiations were conducted). Negotiations on the implementation of Minsk I quickly broke down, but Minsk II—which agreed to Ukrainian neutrality (as opposed to NATO membership) and a measure of self-government and cultural independence for the ethnic-Russian Ukrainians of the Donbas—was signed by representatives of both Russia and Ukraine in 2015. Nevertheless, current Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky, though winning election in 2018 on a pledge to end the civil war, stated in early 2023 that he had never intended to implement Minsk II; moreover, former German prime minister Angela Merkel acknowledged (in late 2022) that the Minsk negotiations (while she was prime minister) were “an attempt to give Ukraine time . . . to become stronger,” referring to Ukraine’s USG-NATO-supplied military power. Which makes clear that the Minsk negotiations were not intended by NATO or Ukraine to end the civil war but, instead, to provoke the (“unprovoked!”) war, which had been the USG agenda all along. Why? To enable the US-UK-EU political-and-media propaganda machine to paint Putin as the aggressor (who, as Biden proclaimed in early 2022, “cannot remain in power!”), the madman who would, after he was through with Ukraine, advance to the Hitlerian conquest of all of Europe. (The same unsubstantiated charge was incessantly leveled during the Cold War by the USG at the Soviet Union.)
While denying Ukraine official NATO membership, the USG had, since 2014, been turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member by lining up NATO missiles (potentially nuclear-armed) along the nearly 1,500-mile Russian-Ukrainian border, pointed at Moscow. The official (and widely accepted in the West) assertion that Russia should not feel threatened by the NATO presence in Ukraine, nor by Ukraine’s proposed entrance into NATO, ignores three facts: first, Ukraine was the avenue of the Nazi invasion of Russia during WWII, resulting in the loss of 27 million Russian lives, both soldiers and civilians; second, the current Nazi presence in the Ukrainian military (previously reported by western media but conveniently ignored or denied since 2022) is avowedly committed to cleansing Ukraine of all ethnic Russians unwilling to cease speaking the Russian language or observing Russian culture; and this, demanded of the largest minority in Ukraine, amounting to well over 8 million Ukrainians (17+%), mostly populating the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine (which has been undergoing shelling, producing thousands of casualties, since 2014); third, in 2019, the USG withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia, which had been in force since 1986, banning missiles with ranges from roughly 300 to 3,500 miles. In view of these facts, to deny that NATO’s presence in Ukraine and Ukraine’s membership in NATO poses an existential threat to Russian national security is—facts be damned—to, either wittingly or unwittingly, be a USG propagandist.
(The claim that NATO is a “defensive” military alliance, as the USG and NATO defenders insist, is also pure propaganda. The evidence? The 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which overthrew the government of Slobodan Milosevic, breaking Yugoslavia into fragments, easily preyed upon by US corporations; the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, which overthrew the government of Muamar Gaddafi, turning Libya into a failed state with a slave trade; the 2019 NATO bombing of Syria, to punish the government of Bashar al-Assad for allegedly launching a chemical attack on Syrian citizens [a claim thoroughly debunked by Grayzone journalist Aaron Mate]. While no angels (and what national leader is?), Milosevic, Gaddafi, and Assad each led independent governments—governments that provided social services for their citizens until made impracticable by NATO attacks—and, accordingly, each were demonized as a “Hitler” by the US-UK-EU political-and-media establishments; as the only one still alive and in power, Assad still is, though Putin has naturally been outranking him since 2016 as the “Hitler” du jour. And all of this, in order to manufacture the consent of the US-UK-EU citizenries to these in the long list of regime-change operations of the American empire.)
The final straw, precipitating the entrance of the Russian military into Ukraine, was the amassing of Ukrainian troops on the western border of the Donbas, presumably in preparation for a full-scale invasion, which would have amounted to a Nazi-inspired-and-crafted final solution for the Russian-ethnic population of eastern Ukraine.
Russia’s Intervention to End the War in Ukraine
The so-called Russian “invasion” of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was called a Special Military Operation (SMO) by Putin, intending to distinguish it from a full-scale war. This, of course, would be a distinction without a difference to Ukrainian (or Russian) casualties. Nevertheless, as independent military experts (such as Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor) have pointed out, for the first year or more of the conflict, the Russian military avoided attacking civilian infrastructure that in a full-scale war (the US military’s invasion of Iraq, for example) would be the first to be pulverized and demolished. The Russian purpose was clearly defined by Putin: to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, and to ensure its future neutrality. Which is to say, Ukraine’s permanent exclusion from NATO, entrance into which immediately obliges any European nation to purchase and deploy US-manufactured weapons; this, of course, had been happening in Ukraine since 2014 anyway, making Ukraine a de facto NATO member when the proxy war first began.
Because of its limited purpose, the Russian intent was not to destroy Ukraine (albeit a measure of destruction occurs in any military conflict) nor was it to annex Ukraine into Russia; instead, the RF’s intention was to force the Ukrainian coup-government to return to the negotiating table for the purpose of ending the civil war. But this time (unlike with Minsk I and Minsk II) Zelensky and his associates would have no choice but to accede to Russia’s national security demands: that NATO, and its weaponry, be permanently excluded from Ukraine; and that Ukraine demilitarize and denazify its government. Which is to say, Russia’s demand was (and remains) Ukrainian neutrality.
Previously, from 2014 to 2022, Putin had refused to intervene during the Ukrainian civil war, insisting instead that the ethnic-Russian republics of the Donbas remain Ukrainian while the Minsk accords were being negotiated; and this, despite the Ukrainian military’s shelling of the Donbas and despite pleas from those republics for Russian intervention on their behalf (Putin’s refusal subjecting him to, from their point of view, understandable criticism). This shows beyond a reasonable doubt that Putin’s intention has never been to expand Russia’s so-called “empire” by incorporating Ukraine into Russia.
(When you compare the handful of Russian military installations outside of Russia, mostly close to its borders, with the 800-plus American military bases and installations all over the world; and when you compare the amount of money the RF spends on its military with what the USG spends—more than the next ten governments, including Russia’s and China’s, combined; and when you compare the number of wars Russia has been engaged in—both during and after it was the Soviet Union—all close to its borders, with the endless warfare America has been waging all over the world since the end of WWII, you can only call Russia an “empire” if you’re engaged in USG propaganda. Accordingly, the American public has been so propagandized by the US political-and-media establishment that well-intentioned Americans regularly parrot USG propaganda that Russia is trying to expand its “empire.”)
Western media claims of “Russian war crimes” are reported, without evidence, as facts—the “evidence” being the allegations of Ukrainian national security officials and their proxies—and, therefore, the claims go uninvestigated. That war crimes have been committed by the Nazi elements in the vanguard of the Ukrainian military is out of the question for the US-UK-EU political-and-media establishments because those facts don’t fit the official narrative of “democratic” Ukraine fighting heroically against “authoritarian” Russia. Photographs of white bands on the arms of civilian murder victims (a signature Nazi marker placed on suspected collaborators with the enemy before execution) and footage of male Ukrainian civilians being forcibly conscripted into the military have found no place in Western media reports. To even suggest that unsubstantiated allegations don’t constitute facts when it comes to “Russian war crimes” is to be a “Putin apologist” or a “Russian propagandist.” As they do in all wars, Russian war crimes may have occurred, but to assert them without substantiating them, is to engage in propaganda.
The Kremlin was evidently not prepared for the flood of advanced weaponry and other military support that the USG-NATO would pour into Ukraine, and the Russian military was forced into an extended campaign. (And these weapons shipments have continued to mount to many billions of US taxpayer dollars.) Then came the (late 2022) CIA-engineered destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (detailed in the widely read investigative report by Seymour Hersh). Nord Stream 1 had once provided inexpensive Russian energy (and Nord Stream 2 would have doubled the amount) to Germany and the rest of the EU. The Nord Stream explosion not only polluted the ocean beyond measure but also conveniently forced the EU to purchase virtually unaffordable liquid natural gas from the US fossil fuel industry (showing the USG’s willingness to sacrifice both its Ukrainian and its European proxies). All of which has clarified beyond doubt that the USG is determined to prolong the war “to the last Ukrainian.” While the superior strength of the Russian military would allow it to continue indefinitely, the Russian desire is, as it has been from the start, to bring the war to a swift end. But to what kind of end?
The End of the Ukraine War
The RF has made it clear that its original national security demands are unchanged. The desired end is a neutral Ukraine, which means a demilitarized and denazified NATO-free Ukraine. The updated demand is that the Ukrainian government accept the will of the republics not only of Crimea but also of Donetsk and Lugansk to be parts of Russia rather than of a Ukraine that has hitherto treated their Russian ethnicity as disqualifying not only of equal rights but of physical safety as Ukrainians.
That this could be an objectionable outcome to any American or European who believes in democracy and wishes for world peace is a tribute to the power of the US-UK-EU propaganda machine. That machine has translated the “doublethink” of Orwell’s 1984 (“war is peace”; “freedom is slavery”; “ignorance is strength”) from dystopian fantasy into contemporary reality.
Famed investigative reporter I.F. Stone wrote, “All governments lie,” but the USG has been so unremittingly pathological and homicidal about its deceptions that it dwarfs all its peers. Every American war in history (as has been demonstrated in this series) has been justified by a USG lie, in order to manufacture the consent of—and eliminate and, if necessary, criminalize dissent by—the American people.
Most Americans are aware of at least some of the lies they’ve been told in the past about why the USG must involve itself in foreign wars, Saddam Hussein’s WMD only the most recent. (The 20-years’ worth of lies about the soon-to-be-won Afghanistan War are now all but forgotten.) But despite all the warmongering lies of the past and despite the knowledge that every war enlarges the fortunes of the military-industrial-complex at the expense of the American people, the will to believe is so strong that many Americans—especially liberals—cling to the belief that this war is somehow different: that what the US political-and-media establishment has told them this time is somehow true. (The fact that Ukrainians rather than Americans are dying probably makes it somewhat easier to believe.)
This, at the core, is faith in capitalism (aka “liberal democracy”), the American religion, which has constructed a government that lies for a good purpose, that being to make America the rich but good ruler of the world, a world in which Americans (or, at least, liberals) will be prosperous (or, at least comfortable) individualists. And the rest of the world will somehow be happy as well.
To believe this isn’t stupidity; it’s to have been so deeply propagandized as to have stopped thinking.
(Those for whom America has stopped working are presently inclining toward unbelief: some curse their god and die an individualistic and, therefore, a bitter death; some are turning their individuality toward community, to make an alternative world that is inclusive of all.)
The longer-lasting this proxy war—which Ukraine and, therefore, the American empire, cannot win—the greater the risk that the (insane? imbecilic?) neocons at the wheel of the recklessly careening American empire will see the nuclear option as their only option. If, instead, they accept defeat in Ukraine as a temporary setback, the economic survival of the empire will then depend on a subsequent proxy war, for which the neocons and their neoliberal cohorts have already begun to summon all the American empire’s Asian minions—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and Taiwan—as proxies to sacrifice on the altar of their most coveted prey: China.