03.03.2022

America’s drive to the east

A volcano of violence has been unleashed by Putin’s invasion, but Daniel Lazare places the main blame on the United States

Imagine a schoolyard bully relentlessly tormenting someone who is smaller and weaker. The victim suffers and suffers, until one day he finally does something dreadful, like going home and fetching a knife or a gun. Amid the ensuing mayhem, two things will be clear. One is that responding in such a way is wrong. The other is that the real responsibility lies with the bully who created this ugly situation in the first place.

So it goes with the United States and Russia. The February 24 invasion of Ukraine is an epochal event that will unleash a volcano of violence, ending who knows where. Highways are clogged with refugees, cities echo with gunfire and explosions, and the Kiev subways are filled with families huddling for safety in a manner unseen since the London blitz. Putin’s decision to place Russia’s nuclear forces on alert brings the world closer to the precipice than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In fact, it may have brought it closer since Kennedy and Khrushchev were already working on a tit-for-tat deal to withdraw US missiles from Turkey in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal from Cuba, while the public was still in emergency mode.

Good sense like that is noticeably absent in today’s fragmented political structure. But, even if Putin avoids going over that particular precipice, he could well go over others. In the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance, he could call in his tanks and artillery to smash Ukrainian cities into smithereens, regardless of civilian casualties (as of March 1, that process already seemed to be underway, as rockets rained down on the north-eastern city of Kharkov). Conceivably, he could cut off oil and gas supplies to Europe, sending the global economy into a tailspin. Or he could strike at US missile emplacements in Poland and Romania that have been a thorn in Russia’s side for years. If so, the US and Nato could find themselves drawn into the war despite all promises to the contrary.

So if it is not 1962, it could well be another 1914. Socialists should therefore make their position clear regarding the invasion: Putin stands condemned in the eyes of the international working class for launching an unprovoked attack that is causing needless death and destruction. But socialists should also make clear that the real blame for this fiasco lies with US imperialism for pushing Russia to the wall.

How did America do this? By relentlessly pursuing Nato’s Drang nach Osten (drive to the east), to the point where Russia’s very existence was under threat.

Not one inch

The process began on the heels of the Soviet collapse in 1989-91. Initially, the period was one of bourgeois utopianism, coupled with starry-eyed social democratic optimism that the end of the cold war would result in a ‘peace dividend’ which would enable progressives to mount a new offensive against poverty and inequality. Swords would be beaten into ploughshares, as a new age dawned.

Hence, all sides agreed that poking the Russian bear would no longer do. US secretary of state James Baker promised to extend Nato “not one inch eastward”, once East and West Germany were unified, and assured Mikhail Gorbachev that “neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place”. All the reigning politicians of the day - Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, and Baker’s boss, George Bush I - agreed. Even Margaret Thatcher was on board, informing Gorbachev in June 1990: “We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured.”¹

But the good feelings soon ran out. If the US did not pull the plug itself, it did not object when others did so instead. As a series of ethnic wars erupted along the old Soviet periphery - in Transnistria in 1990-92, in Abkhazia in 1992-93, and in Chechnya in 1994-96 - former Warsaw Pact members began pushing for integration into both Nato and the European Union. As the movement intensified, Nato admitted the so-called Visegrád Group (ie, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in 1999), followed by seven more states - the Baltics plus Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, while Montenegro and North Macedonia did so in 2017 and 2020 respectively.

With Nato promising at its 2008 Bucharest summit to some day add Georgia and the Ukraine to the list, it looked like Zbigniew Brzezinski’s goal of surrounding Russia with a ring of hostile states was nearing fruition. Indeed, regime-change enthusiasts could soon look forward to stage two, which, according to The grand chessboard, Brzezinski’s 1997 bestseller, involved breaking up Russia into three separate parts: “a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic”.² The Russian Federation, as we now know it, would cease to exist.

Not that the United States was waging a war of aggression - perish the thought! To the contrary, its only concern was world peace. If Nato closed its doors to new applicants, secretary of state Madeleine Albright told a US Senate panel in 1997, “confidence would crumble in central Europe, leading to a search for security by other means, including costly arms build-ups and competition among neighbours”. Hence, Nato expansion was the only thing standing in the way of anarchy and disorder. As for Moscow, Nato expansion was for its good too: “By engaging Russia and enlarging Nato,” Albright said, “we give every incentive to deepen its commitment to peaceful relations with neighbours, while closing the avenue to more destructive alternatives.”³

Arms build-ups were bad - unless they took place under Nato auspices, in which case they were A-OK. Instead of competing among themselves, Nato’s newest members would join forces to rein in Russia and see to it that it remained on its best behaviour. Moscow should thank the west for taking it in hand.

Needless to say, this was the same Madeleine Albright who, when asked about an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children dying from US-UK sanctions, replied, “We think the price is worth it.” America was heading off in a distinctly Strangelovian direction, and it was this qualitative increase in imperial militancy that would soon thrust Putin into power.

The turning point came in March 1999, when the US demanded that Serbia - Russia’s traditional ally in the Balkans - submit to a sweeping set of provisions known as the Rambouillet Accords. These called for 30,000 Nato troops to be stationed in the then Serbian province of Kosovo, with unfettered right of passage through the rest of the country and immunity from Serbian law. It was a recipe for an invasion every bit as sweeping as Putin’s ‘special operation’ in the Ukraine and, although billed as an effort to protect Kosovo’s Albanian population from ethnic cleansing, it in fact led to a far greater ethnic cleansing than what had already taken place.

Henry Kissinger - no-one’s idea of a peacenik - described the Rambouillet Accords as “a provocation, an excuse to start bombing”: a description with which Russia fully agreed. Three months later, UK and Russian forces engaged in a tense stand-off at an airport outside of Pristina, Kosovo, that only ended when British lieutenant general Mike Jackson told Nato supreme commander Wesley Clark, “I’m not going to start the third world war for you”, and backed off. Two months after that, an otherwise obsequious Boris Yeltsin chose a bright young ex-KGB officer named Vladimir Putin as his successor. His mission: resist US strangulation.

There is no point reviewing every last detail of how the ensuing confrontation played out. Suffice it to say that America was increasingly aggressive, while Russia was repeatedly forced to play defensive. In 1999, Brzezinski led a host of neoconservative luminaries in drumming up support for Islamist rebels in the second Chechen War.⁴ Bitterness in Moscow ran high as a consequence. After invading Iraq in 2003, neocons responded with outrage when Putin dared to disagree. In 2008, super-hawk John McCain encouraged Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to attack the breakaway pro-Russian province of South Ossetia and then went into a fury when Russia launched a devastating military offensive in response. US hawks were similarly outraged when Putin opposed a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011. After cackling over the death of Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of a Libyan lynch mob - “We came, we saw, he died!” - secretary of state Hillary Clinton seemed to call for regime change a few weeks later, when she expressed “serious concern about the conduct of the elections” for the Russian duma in December 2011 and called for a “full investigation” of reports of fraud and intimidation.

Finally, there was Putin’s seizure of the Crimea, following a US-sparked coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014, and his intervention in Syria a year and a half later - both eminently justified, by the way, since the United States was angling to seize Russia’s all-important naval base at Sevastopol and the Bashar al-Assad regime pleaded for help in staving off a combined al Qa’eda-Islamic State assault (what would happen if al Qa’eda and IS were victorious was a question that US officials never dared answer). Anti-Russia hysteria reached its high point when Democrats accused Putin of interfering in the 2016 presidential election and installing Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The charge was nonsense, but the Democratic destabilisation campaign continued non-stop for the next four years.

Gallop

All of this may sound like an apologia for the Putin regime, but it is not. Russia is not an imperial power. With an economy smaller than that of South Korea - despite a population nearly three times greater - its clout is far too puny to merit any such appellation. But it is not anti-imperialist either. As a conservative nationalist with a distinctly tsarist bent, Putin has been an equal participant in international capitalism’s gallop to the right. Inside Russia, he has partnered the church and rigged elections, so as to shut out not only a US mouthpiece like Alexei Navalny, but the Communist Party as well.⁵ Outside, he has played footsie with ultra-rightists, ranging from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland.

His conflict with America thus amounts to a complicated pas-de-deux, in which the dancers, despite their seeming antagonism, sashay one another further and further in a conservative direction. This is no doubt why Putin invaded the Ukraine in the first place. Where previous interventions were carefully calibrated, he seems to have gone so far to the right as to re-invent himself as a latter-day kaiser Wilhelm II, as he storms across the battlefield in a neo-Hohenzollern rage.

Based on preliminary battlefield reports, Russian forces seem to have been initially unprepared, their armoured vehicles breaking down and running out of fuel and individual soldiers wandering about in confusion - which is precisely what one would expect of a war launched on a whim by a strongman surrounded by fawning courtiers.

If the war goes badly and the economic crunch continues to intensify, Putin could find himself in deep trouble at home no less than abroad. Regime change may thus wind up self-imposed.

But how different is the story in the west? The answer: not very. Petrol prices have nearly doubled in America since mid-2020, natural gas prices in Germany have more than quadrupled over the last 12 months, while oil is up 33% in 2022 alone.

If the war drives prices up even higher, then the result will also be mounting economic discomfort and rising levels of political volatility. Putin has much to fear from the economic and political fallout. But, after laying the basis for this horror, the American ruling class has much to fear as well, if capitalism enters a new era of war and inflation.

1. ‘Nato expansion: what Gorbachev heard’, National Security Archives, December 12, 2017: nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early.↩︎

2. Z Brzezinski The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives New York 1997, p202.↩︎

3. www.nytimes.com/1997/10/08/world/albright-seeks-early-vote-in-senate-on-larger-nato.html.↩︎

4. www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/08/usa.russia.↩︎

5. F Weir, ‘Communists face rare crackdown in Russia, upending old balance’ Christian Science Monitor October 26 2021: www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/1026/Communists-face-rare-crackdown-in-Russia-upending-old-balance.↩︎