WeeklyWorker

14.11.2024
Fifty Starlink satellites ready for release into near Earth orbit

Notes on the war

Donald Trump has not been slow in coming forward with his peace plan. Not surprisingly, Volodymyr Zelensky is far from keen, nor are European liberals. However, warns Jack Conrad, there is still the distinct danger of escalation and phasing into World War III

Humiliatingly for Volodymyr Zelensky, the US president-elect has already come out with his peace plan - that without even going to the bother of consulting him. When he did telephone Zelensky from Mar-a‑Largo, Trump pointedly told him that the call was made possible because of Elon Musk’s Starlink. He was also curtly informed that Musk himself was in on the call.1 The subtext could not be clearer: Ukraine’s military heavily relies on Starlink for communications with frontline troops and what can be given can be taken away.

Basically Trump’s peace plan has been long touted by the likes of vice-president-elect JD Vance: freeze the existing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and establish a thousand-kilometre buffer zone between the warring countries. One suggestion is that the buffer zone will be patrolled by European and British peacekeepers: and it will be European and British governments who are expected to foot the bill, not the United States.

Negotiations would then follow. Trump, if he is reported accurately, would insist that Ukraine cede Crimea to Russia. Republican strategist Bryan Lanza says the Trump administration would bluntly tell Zelensky to accept a “realistic vision for peace … When Zelensky says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace, once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for president Zelensky: Crimea is gone.”2 That is Trumpian Realpolitik.

After all, not only has Crimea been part of Russia since 1783: it became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solely because of a whim under Nikita Khrushchev in February 1954. True, this might have had something to do with bolstering the number of Russian speakers in Ukraine after the annexation of Volhynia and Galicia to the west.3 But the rearrangement had little more than symbolic importance in those days. Things changed, however, with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and especially the 2014 Maidan coup.

One does not need to trust the March 2014 referendum organised by the Moscow authorities: 97% for integration with the Russian Federation on a 83% voter turnout. Even if the vote had been free and fair - which it palpably was not - a thumping majority ought to have been expected, not least because of anti-Russian rampaging fascist gangs and baying far-right mobs in Ukraine.

Trump, we are told, would be relaxed with Crimea staying under Russian control (the port of Sevastopol was leased under the terms of the May 1997 partition agreement till 2042). This would, of course, allow Russia access to the Mediterranean. So Trump appears more than willing to see a revised Minsk agreement and a strategically bolstered Russian Federation.

The Trump peace deal was apparently worked out in detail by retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg and former CIA official Fred Fleitz - both served as chief of staff in Trump’s National Security Council during his 2017-21 administration. As outlined in a Reuters interview, the treatment Ukraine should expect is going to be brusque and brutal. “We tell the Ukrainians,” says Kellogg, “‘You’ve got to come to the table, and if you don’t come to the table, support from the United States will dry up’.”4

Besides Crimea, the peace deal could well see Ukraine compelled to concede either the whole or parts of the Donbas. That or giving the two oblasts autonomous status within Ukraine. Trump is well aware that the majority of the population in Donetsk and Luhansk would be more than happy remaining Russian citizens. Zaporizhzhia and Kherson could be likewise conceded, divided or, conceivably, traded off in exchange for the Kursk enclave.

There is talk too of Trump blocking the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to Nato - another strategic concession. However, Trump comes not only bearing an olive branch: he has a big stick. If the Putin-FSB regime rejects his peace deal that would see the threat of “increased American support for Ukraine”.5 Perhaps this would mean embracing Zelensky’s victory plan in its entirety … beginning with a green light for the use of British-French-Italian-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles against Russian Federation territory and ending with its three secret clauses. In other words, Trump is seeking some kind of accommodation with Russia, but, failing that, there is the ‘phasing into World War III’.

Pushback

As is well known, Zelensky and his regime have pushed back against any deal that recognises Russia’s post-2014 gains. The official line in Kyiv is still regaining every inch of post-1991 territory … that and Nato-EU membership.

Regardless of the bravado on display from Kyiv politicians, top brass and oligarchs, the fact remains that without US support Ukrainian resistance would quickly degrade from the symmetrical push and counterpush of trench warfare to the hit-and-run tactics of asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. There is, yes, the possibility of the European countries stepping in to save Ukraine. Boris Johnson has been talking to GB News about Britain “having to send ground troops” … and if Ukraine goes down, next it will be Baltics, next Georgia, next Taiwan.6

There are good reasons, however, to be sceptical. So far the US has supplied the great bulk of military hardware. Even combined, the European powers trail far behind: €21 billion, compared to €43.9 billion.7 Leave aside the severe budgetary restraints holding back governments in Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels, Trump would hardly take kindly to the Europeans stymieing his Ukraine peace plan.

A grossly unequal treaty could easily see Zelensky ousted by an Azov, or some such other far-right putsch. They would charge him with selling out, being a Jewish traitor, not being properly Ukrainian. But without powerful outside backers any such post-Zelensky regime could not do anything serious. Ukraine lacks, after all, an independent arms industry.

What of the Putin-FSB regime? Its condition for peace negotiations has been a withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts - all officially incorporated into the Russian Federation. That and a recognition of the annexation of Crimea and Ukraine abandoning Nato membership plans. The Kremlin has been demanding the lifting of western sanctions too. And, according to Nina Khrushcheva - great granddaughter of Nikita and an authority on Russian politics - “Putin feels he is starting out with Trump from a position of strength.”8

With talk of a Russian winter offensive in Zaporizhzhia and the war going in Russia’s favour in Donbas, at least for the moment, Putin might be tempted to gamble on Trump not only leaving Ukraine in the unenviable position of 1938 Czechoslovakia, but demanding the lot … that is, the reunification of Great and Little Russia.

That would be massive overreach. After all, not only do we have the possibility of Trump junking the Kellogg-Fleitz peace plan and opting instead for Zelensky’s victory plan. There are those from Trump’s first administration who are full-blown warmongers. Mike Pompeo - former secretary of state - has called for tougher sanctions, lifting all restrictions on the use of American weapons in Ukraine and creating a “lend-lease” programme worth $500 billion to allow Ukraine to purchase US manufactured weapons.9

However, Trump has made it clear, he will not be tapping Pompeo to be part of his second administration.10 There is also Donald Trump Jr, who says that there is no place in his father’s second administration for “war hawks”.11 Trump Jr has, it should be noted, taken an increasingly prominent role in Republican politics and there is the distinct possibility of him becoming the First Son.

Nonetheless, as things stand today, American strategists must, on balance, be more than satisfied with their Russo-Ukraine proxy war. Far from Ukraine hitting the surrender button with Russia’s ‘special military operation’ back in February 2022, it survived - in no small part due to the sale of $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles supplied to Ukraine during the first Trump administration. Moreover, due to substantial western military, technical and financial aid, Russia has since then got bogged down in what is a 21st century version of the 1914-18 western front. A quagmire that has so far claimed between 113,000 and 160,000 Russian lives.12

The idea, common on the idiot left - including the pro-Kremlin Z left - that the Russian invasion is succeeding; that Ukraine is doing terribly badly; that the Kursk incursion was a dreadful blunder, a brilliant Putin trap that Zelensky fell headlong into; that the US has met its limits in Ukraine - all such nonsense testifies to a profound political myopia brought about by wishful thinking. No-one - no-one who is serious, that is - expected Ukraine to defeat Russia and send it packing back to the 1991 borders. That was never on the cards. Continued Ukrainian resistance is a US-EU victory in itself.

With that in mind, leaving European countries to bear the main burden of backing Ukraine, in the event of Putin-FSB overreach, while Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop, etc sell lots and lots of very expensive armaments - well, that would make perfect sense from a Trumpian point of view. All the more so if China becomes ever more closely entangled with Putin’s bid to create a Greater Russia.

Three kingdoms

Back in the third century CE the Chinese imperial chancellor, Zhuge Liang, orchestrated a conflict between the Han state in the in the north and the Chu state in the south, allowing the Shu state in the west to rise to dominance.13 It became known as the ‘Three kingdoms’ strategy. The US pursued just such a course in World War I and World War II. It stayed aloof from the struggle to begin with, profited hugely from the fire sale of assets, granted loans and sold arms … and then came in late to tip the military balance.

Such grand manoeuvres are doubtless being contemplated in Mar-a-Largo. It is not that Donald Trump is a master strategist. He is, so we are told, far from being widely read. Michael Wolff claimed in his Fire and fury (2018) that “Trump doesn’t like to read at all”. Nor does he “process information in any conventional sense”. In some ways, he is “postliterate - total television”.14 But that does not make him a fool and he will certainly recruit a capable combination of MAGA ideologues, business moguls, political insiders and military men, as he did with his last administration. Who he listens to is entirely another matter though. He is mercurial, to put it mildly.

Incidentally, the notion that Marxism considers the role of individuals an irrelevance, that the means of production and the relations of production act as iron determinates, is a travesty. People make history and they do so using the ideas they have in their heads. Quirks, fads, drives and talents matter. Trump has a short attention span, but is a born showman with a sixth sense for the public square. Above all, though, Donald is Donald.

Perhaps Trump’s big idea at the moment is to offer Russia entry into the lower ranks of the imperialist club. In other words, revive the G8. In return Russia would be expected to break its ‘no limits’ alliance with China - a Mao-Nixon rapprochement in reverse. That, maybe, is what Trump’s peace plan is designed to achieve. But, let’s be honest, we really don’t know. Indeed it is more than likely that Trump himself does not really know either.

Geoff Raby, former Australian ambassador in Beijing, argues that China is expanding in central Asia at Russia’s expense, that Russia is losing more in Asia than it could ever gain in Europe. Still, if Raby is correct and Putin sees it this way, a rapprochement with the US would, therefore, include Russia regaining influence in its central Asian near abroad.15

But Raby might easily be wrong. Does the Putin-FSB regime really resent China’s growing eastern influence? Or does Moscow think it is getting a good bargain with ‘Chussia’? After all, China imports all that oil and gas, which keeps the Russian economy afloat and on a war footing. Officially, the two countries are committed to developing cooperation in Eurasia, especially in central Asia, which will allow them to build what they call a fairer economic model - certainly compared to western neoliberalism. Either way, they surely have mutual or partially overlapping interests.

Leave aside Russia’s relations with Xi Jinping, things point towards some kind of deal in Ukraine. Russia would at the very least see an end to western sanctions and gain some internationally recognised territory under Trump’s peace plan. On the other hand, if Trump took up Zelensky’s victory plan, Putin might not survive in office and the FSB regime could easily go down to a colour revolution that ends in the break-up of the Russian Federation. Unless, of course, China came riding to the rescue.

But China will itself soon be subject to swingeing tariffs on its commodities, ranging from 10% to 60%. That promises not just extra tax revenues flowing into Washington’s coffers, but, in China, the prospect of something like Japan’s three lost decades (slow or negative growth rates). Moreover, a US-Russia grand deal would see China surrounded at a stroke and either forced into accepting the status of a US neocolony, having its arms industry dramatically scaled down, its big banks and companies bought up on the cheap, etc - that or face strangulation and potential state collapse. Understandably, given the historic experience of its ‘long century’ of colonial oppression (1839-1949) seared into its collective memory, China might well choose to resist any such outcome, using whatever means it has at its disposal.

Then again, strategists in Moscow and Beijing will be looking for ways to stop MAGA. Exacerbating cracks, tensions and divisions between the US and the EU has long been a Russian stratagem. There will doubtless be further Russian attempts to cleave Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia away from the Nato consensus.

A Christian Democrat-AfD government in Berlin would, for sure, represent a massive boost for Russia. Germany has, after all, once again become the “sick man of Europe” - no, not because the country abandoned nuclear power (an extraordinarily daft idea). It is the Ukraine war which has left it at the bottom of the G7 performance table: “Germany’s terms of trade deteriorated hugely after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the price of natural gas soared,” writes the FT’s Martin Wolf.16 Blowing up Nord Stream 1 and 2 in September 2022 amounted to rubbing Germany’s face in the dirt. So, yes, Germany has an objective interest in peace with Russia. We saw that with Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik back in the late 1960s. However, Germany also has an interest in uniting around itself Kerneuropa (core Europe) and again becoming an imperial player in its own right. A fourth Reich!

We should certainly expect geostrategic shifts. True, the Brics+ have nothing in common - apart, that is, from chafing against US hegemony. But this does give Russia allies, or at least sympathy, amongst what it calls the “global majority”. Note, amongst those who have, want to, or have been invited to join are Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Aukus has already been established and Japan and South Korea bolted on. This has broken Australia from its natural trading partner, China, and secured it firmly in the US-UK camp. The US can perhaps rely on India to be antagonistic to China, but not Russia. There is, moreover, the danger of the big powers being dragged into conflicts over Iran, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, etc, etc, with all manner of unintended consequences.

Sleepwalkers

Bear in mind, in this context, the long ‘sleepwalk’ towards World War I.17 Enemies became friends and friends became enemies.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 transformed Germany from being the fragmented and weak centre of Europe into its most dangerous power. Soundly beaten, resentful and fearful, republican France sought allies to contain the newly formed German Reich - the most obvious partner being tsarist Russia.

Their 1894 alliance committed each side to mutual aid. True, this meant that in the event of war Germany would have to fight on two fronts. The alliance, however, was just as much directed against Britain. France and Britain were, of course, old enemies and there were bitter rivalries between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan, Persia, China and the Turkish Straits. Russia longed to gain unfettered access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean by getting its hands onto Constantinople.

And it was fear of Russia that took Britain into alliance with Japan in 1902. A few years later, in 1904, the Japanese-Russian war began and ended in humiliating defeat for Russia. British-built and British-designed Japanese battleships featured prominently. A global shock and a trigger for the 1905 revolution in Russia.

Against the Franco-Russian alliance Germany responded by tying Austria-Hungary ever more closely to itself. Because Austria-Hungary and Russia were fierce competitors in the Balkans, this committed Germany to a war with Russia that it really did not want. Germany also started an ill-judged naval race with Britain. Germanophobic scare stories were regularly promoted in the Daily Mail and The Times and featured in popular novels such as Erskine Childers’ The riddle of the sands (1903). The German Reich came to be seen as Britain’s most deadly global rival by elite and middle class opinion alike.

As Britain just managed ‘a near-run victory’ in the second Boer War, it felt compelled to abandon its ‘splendid isolation’ from continental European concerns and instead embraced its old enemy, France - an arrangement cemented in 1904 with the Entente Cordiale. France’s alliance with tsarist Russia became, in due course, a triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia. Historic rivalry pitting Russia against Britain over southern Asia ended with various robber-deals, including dividing Persia into two zones of interest.

Such realignments readied the conditions needed for defeating the central powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. True, the US eventually entered the war and guaranteed the outcome, and Russia was taken out of the imperial system altogether by the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution.

Yet, while between 15 and 22 million died, in the end, Germany was much reduced territorially, stripped of colonies and saddled with crippling reparation payments. As for the Austro-Hungarian empire, it was fragmented into a series of small, often rival, states. That left Austria as little more than a pocket-sized territory with a grand imperial capital. And, apart from Turkey itself - ‘liberated’ by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - Anglo-French imperialism neatly sliced and diced the Ottoman empire into colonial or semi-colonial administrative units.

Alternative

Clearly there is more than a whiff of pre-World War I about the current situation - ie, great power military conflict seems all too possible - but with the added danger of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. However, tragically, what is lacking is a viable socialist alternative.

Despite the betrayal of August 1914, two generations of workers were educated in Marxism by the Second International and its mass parties. The working class had state power nearly within its grasp in a string of countries - itself a factor in the descent into the abyss. The ruling classes of Germany, Russia, Austria, France, Italy and Britain preferred war to revolution and socialism.

Today the general secretaries of the countless confessional sects hold out the promise to their little band of followers that they are on the cusp of another Russian Revolution. The comforting myth is that the Bolsheviks went from nothing to everything in the eight short months between February and October 1917. Absolute and total nonsense, of course. From 1905 onwards, despite periods of severe repression, the Bolsheviks were, in fact, the majority party of the working class. Proved by newspaper circulation figures, workplace donations, duma, trade union and, from the summer of 1917 onwards, soviet elections in Petrograd, Moscow and other major towns and cities.

Serious business

No, we must do away with sect delusions - along with broad frontism, left Labourism, anarchism and syndicalism - and get down to the serious business of uniting in the common struggle to build a mass Communist Party here in Britain and internationally. That remains the main, the key, the abiding task.

We all know that the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves in World War I by upholding the November 1912 Basel congress resolution of the Second International and its “war on war” stance. Following in the footsteps of the Copenhagen (1910) and Stuttgart (1907) congresses, delegates in Basel unanimously agreed that socialists should “exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective”.

The heroic stand made by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht against the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war - for which they served two years imprisonment - was widely cited as a shining example. The same went for the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia and the 1910 militant strike wave in Britain.

In that spirit, the Basel congress warned: if “war should break out anyway it is their [ie, the socialist parties’] duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”.18

Lenin constantly referred back to the Basel resolution and deployed it in polemical salvoes against the social-imperialists, social-pacifists and centrists alike. Social-imperialists and reformists would have to be purged, he insisted. Unity with the social-imperialists means an alliance between the working class and their ‘own’ bourgeoisie.

Indeed in their pamphlet, Socialism and war, Vladimir Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev drew a sharp line of demarcation against those reformists platonically calling for ‘peace’ (Keir Hardie) and the ‘neither victory nor defeat’ centrists, who countenanced unity with Menshevik social-traitors (Leon Trotsky). The only principled position for the revolutionary class to take was, insisted the Lenin-Zinoviev team, to “wish for the defeat of its government” in order to “facilitate its overthrow”. In short the slogan: “Convert the imperialist war into civil war”.19

A thoroughly realistic strategy. True, most of the MPs, trade union officials and apparatus tops had gone from tolerable(ish) opportunism to full-blown social-imperialism. But, once the reality of the war dawns amongst the broad mass of the population, so went the reasoning, the principled left would go from being a minority to a majority and could, therefore, take full advantage of the turmoil caused by the war. Coordinated revolution was a real prospect.

In all honesty, we cannot hold out such an immediate strategy today. Across the whole of the planet, there is not a single workers’ party worthy of the name. There are plenty of little groups that call themselves parties, but no actual party. We in the CPGB are proud to have the name of a party, but there “exists no real Communist Party” (Weekly Worker ‘What we fight for’). By “Communist Party” we mean part - a mass part, the advanced part - of the working class.

So, when it comes to the danger of a wider European or global conflict, “we can”, as I stated in my first article on the Ukraine war, “only adopt a moral stance for the moment”. We are, therefore, more in the position of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1870 than Vladimir Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev in 1914. Nonetheless, it is “vital that we take our stand.”20

There are, of course, those who fail to understand what we mean by revolutionary defeatism. Some believe, for example, that to be for revolutionary defeatism of one’s ‘own’ side, you must, therefore, be for the victory of the ‘other’ side. No, there is not the slightest reason for us to urge on Russian forces to take the whole of the Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk and then drive still further west to install an FSB quisling in the Mariyinsky Palace. That would be like urging on Otto von Bismarck and Prussia in 1870 (the position of Ferdinand Lassalle’s successors).

Then there are those who universalise revolutionary defeatism. No, we are for the wars of resistance conducted in Palestine and Lebanon. That entails no illusions in Hamas or Hezbollah. We should defend ourselves against them when and where necessary, but the main enemy is unmistakably Israel.

For many anarchists, syndicalists, pacifists and left centrists too, the way to achieve peace is through sabotage, blockading arms factories, strikes on the railways and at ports, disrupting supply lines, etc. No, while we would do our utmost to support any peace demonstration, any manifestation of mass anger against what is a reactionary war on both sides, we will not deceive anyone that there can be a lasting peace, a democratic peace, in the absence of a revolutionary movement - crucially a mass Communist Party.

Whoever wants a lasting peace, a democratic peace, “must stand for civil war against the governments of the bourgeoisie”.21 That is what we mean by revolutionary defeatism!

  1. www.axios.com/2024/11/08/musk-trump-zelensky-ukraine-call.↩︎

  2. kyivindependent.com/crimea-is-gone-senior-trump-advisor-says-ukraine-needs-to-be-realistic.↩︎

  3. www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago.↩︎

  4. www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-reviews-plan-halt-us-military-aid-ukraine-unless-it-negotiates-peace-with-2024-06-25.↩︎

  5. The Independent June 25 2024.↩︎

  6. The Daily Telegraph November 12 2024.↩︎

  7. www.statista.com/chart/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine-by-country.↩︎

  8. time.com/7173792/putin-plays-tough-in-his-opening-message-to-trump.↩︎

  9. The Wall Street Journal July 25 2024.↩︎

  10. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-nikki-haley-mike-pompeo-cabinet-picks-administration-b2644398.html.↩︎

  11. The Daily Telegraph November 10 2024.↩︎

  12. The Guardian October 22 2024.↩︎

  13. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang.↩︎

  14. M Wolff Fire and the fury: inside the Trump White House London 2018.↩︎

  15. www.afr.com/world/asia/xi-is-thumping-putin-in-the-great-game-20241016-p5kipx.↩︎

  16. Financial Times July 16 2024.↩︎

  17. See C Clark The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 London 2013.↩︎

  18. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1912/basel-manifesto.htm.↩︎

  19. VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p311-15.↩︎

  20. J Conrad, ‘Here we stand’ Weekly Worker March 3 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1385/here-we-stand).↩︎

  21. VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p316.↩︎