The Allies get the band back together
One last battle royale against authoritarianism. Hop on board
After an incredibly dark and unhinged couple of weeks, most who pay attention to the news have lost any rational ability to look at current events and not be disturbed, angry and dejected. I put myself comfortably in this category, but I’m not someone with any power to change the situation. I’m just another jerk on the internet. Those in charge of the globe are throwing their absolute all at maintaining power, and that includes all the elite classes of Russia, Ukraine, China, the UK, Germany, the US, and so on, and so on. In an ominous turn, many powerful people across Europe and the US are stating we are already in World War III.
Which brings us to a neat division of countries, along these lines: freedom vs control, liberty vs coercion, democracy vs autocracy. Our culture has been regurgitating these narratives in films and stories for decades, but it seemed to have lost its lustre in recent times. The US, through total failure in the Middle East, had grown unsure of itself, no longer confident enough to continue to use overwhelming force to spread its values overseas anymore. Trump and his endless aggravating of the EU and NATO nearly finished the Western alliance for good. But now, in the face of the new Russia-China ‘no limits’ friendship, the Allies are back, in a big way. German defence spending is being ramped up, their arms industry is sending weapons overseas again, Japan is back in the aircraft carrier game, and the Russian bear is rampaging through Eastern Europe. It’s not 1942, it’s 2022. The old Axis powers might be firmly entrenched in the American alliance rather than the enemy, but we’re told the same story: Russia and China are a threat to their neighbours, Ukraine and Taiwan respectively. Their authoritarian regimes at home know nothing of civil liberties for their citizens, and dictators hold an iron grip of control on all levers of power. These regimes are a threat to freedom, both near and abroad, and therefore, must be fought in an existential battle to the end.
Liberal democracy is at risk, and the West has its mojo back. This is the reading of many smart people, such as ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Noah Harari. I am under no illusions of what those other regimes offer their citizens, and under no circumstances would I rather call those places home. But I would also add, the reality that we are we are a democracy, and Russia and China aren’t, is not the main political or historical reason for my personal preference of geographical location. Us being a settler colony, far from the troubles of the Old World, abundant in natural resources, and absolute luck in the lottery of life are far more determinative of my political circumstance than the wonders of ‘democracy’. This point is a little confusing for most people, but should be salient before we rush to war and global catastrophe against the robotic brainwashed hordes of eastern Eurasia.
Just to explain this a little clearer: the war is being framed in the West as a battle between good and evil. As I’ve already stated in previous newsletters, Putin and his inner circle of oligarchs have conducted an illegal war and it would be lovely if there were a functioning mechanism in place to hold him to account for these actions. Last newsletter I outlined why this is very unlikely, and broadly why China and Russia seem to hold such little regard for the liberal conceptions of ‘human rights’. We’re going to continue on this thread for one final time, because the nonsense coming out of our leaders mouths at this time deserves rebuttal.
As the world continues to divide into power blocs, we in Australia will have to grow accustomed to seeing everyone from the Prime Minister of Japan to the Finance Minister of Canada as part of our collective leadership. With that in mind, it’s been interesting to see US Vice President Kamala Harris step up on the world stage these past couple weeks, delivering platitude after platitude and false binaries to a largely fawning European media and elite. Here’s what she had to say about the invasion: it “threatens democracy and security across Europe” (no argument there) and “by extension, when democracy is threatened anywhere it threatens us all”. Our leaders are well versed in stating these soundbites, perfect for cable news and newspapers alike. George W Bush wasn’t the best at it (“they hate us for our freedoms”), Obama was incredible at it, and Harris is attempting her hardest to emulate Barry, but appears more like a poor facsimile of the real thing. Either way, all it takes is one look at our key alliances to understand how hollow these statements are. We are more than comfortable to be friendly with a theocratic absolute monarch that relentlessly bombs its neighbours, creating a refugee crisis bar none, doesn’t allow females equal rights at home, tramples all over LGBTQI+ rights, derives all its revenue from the extraction of fossil fuels, and for good measure, kills journalists. Yes, its Saudi Arabia, and wow, don’t we need them right now.
It’s nearly impossible to square Harris’s idolisation of democracy with our steadfast alliance with the royal house of Saud, led by Mohammad bin Salman (MBS). The only justification exists outside values based liberal idealism: business and security. “Ever since the modern U.S.–Saudi relationship began in 1945, the United States has been willing to overlook many of the kingdom's more controversial aspects such as Wahhabism, its human rights and alleged state-sponsored terrorism as long as it maintained oil production and supported U.S. national security policies.” Thanks Wikipedia, which sometimes does it better than anyone. Democracy, human rights of self determination, political expression and sexual preference are all Western ideals that have been readily sacrificed for the continuation of this relationship. At this moment, the US is falling over itself to secure yet more oil supplies from the Saudis, to compensate for the loss of Russian oil due to massive sanctions applied to Russia for the Ukrainian invasion. As for the Saudis, they’ll ask for more weapons in their proxy battle against Iran currently being fought south across the border in Yemen. Biden made a big show of cancelling US direct military operations in Yemen upon coming to office last year, but I would not be surprised to see that commitment fall apart.
The Yemeni Civil War is incredibly confusing, sad, and distressing. I don’t have any of the answers, just to say, we see no problem in the continued to support violent wars undertaken by our friends, and vehemently oppose and denounce those undertaken by our enemies. If we are comfortable trading with Saudi Arabia, if we can conveniently forget that their leader MBS personally ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist in 2018, why can’t we be comfortable trading with Russia and China? And when the alternative is potentially World War III, as the power blocs appear to be posturing towards, maybe we require a different approach to international relations, diplomacy and negotiation? It all comes down to our perceived moral superiority to others, the natural temptation of all humans to see themselves as noble, wise and fair, as compared to those irrational demonic monsters in former ‘communist’ states. Leave it to Trump, as usual, to lift the lid on the whole edifice with this timeless truth:
To be absolutely clear, people hated Trump because he would say the quiet part out loud. This contrasts sharply with Obama, who was so eloquent and restrained in his rhetoric that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 after 9 months in office. What Trump did was make it very hard for liberals and democrats to say that the US truly was the shining worldwide beacon of freedom and democracy. This undermines the argument of superiority and exceptionalism, which allows us to say that when we invade and destroy Iraq, it is a ‘mistake.. a misadventure’, rather than a crime against international law that eventually laid waste a fair portion of the Middle East. Trump expressed our relationships with authoritarian regimes as necessary, which they are according to current energy requirements. All we need to do is extend the fields of cooperation with countries with different political orientations to us, because we need Russia and China to be on the side of clean energy, security and peace as we move forward through this century.
The Western Alliance is gearing up for war, and calling upon us to defend our freedoms. That option may seem easier and safer, probably because we think we can win. The amount of human suffering, starvation and depravation this hubris will cause will be the defining reality of our time. And what if we don’t win? The sanctions on Russia currently so celebrated in the West are leading to eye-watering energy and wheat prices. Mass global economic destruction is highly likely in the coming year, and commuters and consumers from Bristol to Berlin to Boston will all feel the pain. We in the West feel that in the form of ‘inflation’, higher prices for the essentials, and unemployment, which can be somewhat cushioned by government spending. In poorer countries, this means the very dark reality of mass starvation, unemployment and poverty, without strong governmental function and ability to soften the blow. And again, it’s not because these poor countries in Africa and Asia aren’t ‘liberal capitalist democracies’ that they are poor. Its their legacy of Western colonialism, the plundering of natural resources for centuries, and finally multinational capitalist production that refuses to pay fair wages and taxes that results in billions of people living in abject poverty. Neo-colonialism is a key concept to understanding wealth disparities and conflict drivers in the world today, with governments in the global south still having to pay rich countries, in the form of reparations, for the continued privilege of being free from direct foreign control. Haiti’s relationship with France comes to mind.
Mass hunger and poverty are the hidden consequences of the sanctions, but most of the elite and rich in the West confidently assert that this economic and social calamity in lands far from Ukraine is merely a ‘small price to pay’ if it leads to the toppling of Putin. Personally, I can’t agree with such a cavalier approach to the lives of millions, and especially not considering the other diplomatic options that have always been on the table. Russia is unhinged at the moment, embracing the worst elements of its communist forefather, but the Ukraine crisis simply cannot continue to bubble over. A ceasefire would save countless lives, a neutral status for Ukraine must be negotiated, and the slow process of rebuilding the damaged cities and people must begin. Russia and Putin may never be held accountable for their war of aggression, but neither were Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Oldboys for Democracy may have been a flop, but it still hit hard!
The Costs of War project at Brown University in the US estimates that “at least 929,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan”, and that “the U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.” Journalists such as Julian Assange who dare to expose these assaults on justice and democracy are held in Western prisons. And our actions in the War on Terror over the past two decades have also given cover for Putin’s invasions of Chechnya, and of the Chinese repression of Uyghur’s in Xinjiang. Both these governments openly justify these operations as part of their own wars on terrorists, instantly negating Western ‘human rights’ criticism. Again, not to say any of this is right, only to make the rather basic claim that we are unfortunately seeing the predictable consequences of the US jeopardising its credibility and standing through constant violation of international law. It’s also an unfortunate truth that as a democracy, many in America supported the War on Terror, giving some popular legitimacy to these horrible crimes in the form of a second term for Bush. And just like in Vietnam as the consequences of military invasion began to become clearer, support for the war began to dry up. These are all lessons of history that we should hold front of mind in this current moment of nationalist and idealistic fevour.
What I am engaging in here is the thoughtcrime of “whataboutism” at its purest, but after all, this is all that the basic social behaviour of negotiation truly is. All settling of conflict requires the trading of demands, concessions, the asking of “what about this?” If we believe Russia and China are truly immune to such interpersonal relations and diplomatic processes, there is no choice except for total war footing and mobilisation at this moment. And if that floats your boat, the Western Alliance is more than willing to take you on board for one last battle.
Liberals loved Obama because he said all the right things, and he said it well. Harris, in addition to her chequered past as a prosecutor, fails because she isn’t as skilled as an orator as Obama, who honed his communication power as a lawyer and then a community organiser in Chicago. He campaigned as an anti-war/Wall St candidate, and defeated the Republican war hero John McCain to become president in 2008. One reading of this could be: the American populace had grown tired of the War on Terror, and decided to democratically transition the government to a more liberal, peace minded leadership team. Indeed, as stated earlier, Obama won global accolades for his message, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his pure potential to be a global leader for a better future. Well, fast forward 8 years to the end of his second term, and the US was still undertaken wars and military interventions in dozens of countries around the world, conducting drone strikes that killed thousands of innocent civilians, and maintaining and extending the civil-liberty infringing surveillance state at home. Far from ending the wars, Obama actually massively increased troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as we all know, ISIS and the Taliban flourished in the ashes of invasion and destruction. Obama oversaw ‘military interventions’ (regime changes) in Libya, Syria, just as Putin is overseeing ‘special military operations’ in Ukraine.
So, as a thought exercise, what do we make of Obama’s failure to end the wars and regime change operations? Obama made sure at every opportunity to add layers of seriousness and rhetorical gravity to his speeches to explain his decision making, and in his many memoirs, always describes his personal anguish at continuing to administer the insatiable Empire he initially said he opposed. All the while, his public arguments were that these bombs were necessary, and that they were the worst of all possible options he was considering. Of course he would say that, but it didn’t end the death and destruction, and only sowed the seeds for more ‘extremism’ and heartfelt resentment in the Middle East.
The only rational reading is that Obama failed due to circumstances beyond his control, even as the democratically elected most powerful person on Earth. Indeed, this was the argument he makes in his memoirs, and what his defenders in the media and politics continue to profess. At least he tried! The sad truth is our mechanism of popular legitimacy, our superior democracy, could not end the wars, and conflict continues. It is apt to quote Marx: “Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing”. The forces of war, and those who profit from the need for weapons, guarantee that even when an anti-war candidate is elected, democracy in the abstract cannot defeat the material interests of the military industry complex. These are not new ideas: indeed, President Eisenhower in 1961 warned about the creeping anti-democratic power of arms manufacturers, policy institutes and ex-military who benefit from war production.
And if that is too much like ancient history for you and doesn’t seem relevant to the current Ukrainian crisis, here’s an article in the New York Times on the expansion of NATO in 1997, the main driver of listed Russian security concerns that have been used to justify the invasion. It lucidly details the networks of wealth and self-interest that conflate national security with personal gain, relationships of power and influence that lead to rather obvious comparisons to the war-making oligarchs of Russia.
Freedom vs control, liberty vs coercion, democracy vs autocracy are simple false binaries that totally fail to describe the world accurately. They don’t help us assess why we are in this mess, and will in no way give clarity of how we can work together to end future war and conflict. The history of the world is shaped by forces much greater than values, but so long as we continue to believe we are judicious in our own expressions of violence, so too will others. “Whataboutism” plays a central role in assessing current events, in making us collectively assess our past actions, and in potentially de-escalating conflict. Maybe more of it isn’t such a bad thing.
“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” said Lenin.
For me, university is back in session, and I’ll likely take a break from these newsletters. When I started sending these out 6 months ago, I was looking for a way to continue to flex my writing skills and thought the pressure of a small public readership would be the only way to keep me going. Thanks for reading. I first tried to take a more historical approach, looking back at the Opium Wars and China’s justified suspicion of outsiders. Little did I realise that the post-Cold War order would collapse in short order, and that trying to write about current international affairs would need to be a full time occupation. I don’t have such dedication, or the time, and even as I am attempting to write a weekly ‘newsletter’, the situation deteriorates to a point that makes any attempt at analysis redundant. Getting the Ukraine invasion wrong has made me urgently update my model of understanding of the world, and try and go out and do something positive. Writing a snarky online newsletter for friends and family probably isn’t that, but I still have a couple of investigative pieces of original reporting in the bag which I hope to get to in the coming months. Thanks again, keep safe and well.