2022-03-02 UKRAINE CRISIS: BUILDING A JUST AND PEACEFUL WORLD
MEK Note: Go to website for full transcript and video of this discussion. I ignored speaker Dr. Lyle Goldstein, who is the director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities. Lyle earlier served 20 years as research professor at the US Naval War College, where he founded and led the China Maritime Studies Institute. I found Dr. Lyle Goldstein too blindly anti-Russian and pro American.]
Richard Falk: (02:50)
I think this Webinar series is really an important initiative because media coverage of Ukraine crisis has been disappointing, to put it mildly, and has failed to see to portray the complexities of the situation and its multi level significance in terms of world order, sovereignty, non aggression norms, the UN role, geopolitics and many other nuclear weapons, of course, and many other dimensions.
So I hope we’ll be able to shed some illuminating light on all of these issues in the course of the series. And this is the initial meeting, and it gives us the opportunity to maybe clarify the main themes that we’ll address in subsequent sessions. I think that’s enough for me.
Helena Cobban: (04:12)
For another, that’s wonderful. And I think it’s great that you did actually note the problems in the media coverage globally. The media seems to have become bifurcated. Many people say, sorry, I’m just trying to bring something up here that should have been up before. Yeah. So first of all, I’m going to give a slightly longer introduction to our guest, Vijay Prashad. Maybe he doesn’t need much introduction. He is an Indian leftist and peace and justice activist. He’s the director of Tricontinental, the Institute for Social Research, the chief editor of Left Word Books, and a senior nonresident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. He’s the author of 30 books, including The Darker Nations, Karma of Brown Folk, and so on and so forth. Vijay is with us today from Santiago de Chile. Great to have you with us. Vijay Prashad.
Vijay Prashad: (12:06)
I jotted down eight very dramatic eight theses. So let me just share those in five minutes and then see how they go.
The first is obviously war is terrible. I mean, everybody wants negotiations and diplomacy. It’s quite clear that even the Russians are very keen on coming back to the table. They said that they would meet in Belarus and so on. You’ve got to take any opportunity because war is basically the breakdown of diplomacy, and every war ends with some diplomacy. Might as well accelerate to diplomacy as quickly as possible. So that’s the first thing I think most people around the world are hoping for.
That second thesis is that this war did not begin in February when the Russians entered militarily. This war, most people, I think around the world, see this war as having begun in 2014. At least let’s call it what it was with the coup in the Maidan when the government was overthrown, when essentially Victoria Nuland was there saying, fuck the EU, not my language, her language. And putting in place a US backed government.
She kept saying, let’s go with Yats and eventually Poroshenko came into power. That’s really got to be part of the equation. You can’t start thinking about this from the 22nd of February. You won’t understand anything. Then you will entirely accept the US media narrative that Putin is just brutal and aggressive. Then you don’t have to have a reason. You just have force one way or the other. You have reason. We need to understand what’s happening. There’s a big difference between explanation and justification. I’m offering an explanation. I’m not justifying anything. But thesis number two is: the war doesn’t begin then. And this war from 2014 was real for the people of the Donbas, where there was real violence visited upon people, including for Ukrainians, who then left the Donbas region for Kiev. There was ethnic cleansing on all sides going on there. It’s intolerable. The Minsk agreement was meant to settle that. Obviously didn’t work very well, that’s the second thesis.
The third thesis is that the violence in the Donbas and what was happening in the Kiev government, Poroshenko’s government in particular was the collapse of Soviet Plurinationalism and the emergence of a kind of ultranationalist Ukrainian ideology against not only the Russian speakers but against Moldovans, against Ukrainians, against Hungarians.
Situation was so bad that the Hungarian Parliament made a criticism of what was happening in Kiev that they were driving a kind of Ukraine First policy. Poroshenko was very much not just in language, but also religion. They broke ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, you know, with the Russian Church saying we want independence for the Ukrainian Church. All of this. It had the knock on effect of emboldening all kinds of fascistic elements as well. I don’t want to exaggerate them, but the battalion is real. It’s not the fantasy of anybody. These are real developments and they come out of this accelerated ultranationalism which was a consequence of the coup of 2014. That’s the third thesis.
The fourth thesis was that not only the former Communist state’s system of Eastern Europe but also Russia, USSR. Because it was not just Russia, it was also Belarus, Ukraine and so on. All of them sought some sort of equation in the 1990s with Europe. There were two angles for that equation. One was through the European Union, political and to some extent economic, and then through NATO. Let’s not forget that Russia in 1994 was a NATO partner of peace.
Russia entered the NATO process. In fact, in 2004, when seven Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States, joined NATO, Russia did not object in 2004. The first known objection by Mr. Putin comes in 2007, but we can discuss that later. So European integration was very much a part of this. But in whose terms will that integration take place?
Thesis number five and I’m sorry, I’m running through this so quickly, but here it goes. Thesis number five. You see, the United States has made it very clear that European nonalignment or independence of European, any Gallic Europe is impossible. They said this in the 1961, 1962 Fouchette process. Those who remember or have read about the Fouchette process that was set aside when Maastricht treaty took place, 93, then Amsterdam Treaty, 97, then the Lisbon Treaty and so on. Europe kept trying to develop some independent foreign policy. This so-called common strategic and foreign policy approach. Javier Solana, Baroness Ashton and so on were in those seats. That was all essentially toothless. Europe could not develop an independent foreign policy. And this was when it becomes, in a sense, interesting because the United States was putting the point that it’s okay to expand NATO.
It’s okay to bring the east into Europe as long as Europe as an entity is in some senses subordinated to the United States. That’s the six thesis. I jumped ahead. Sorry. The six thesis is that the attempt by Europe to create an independent foreign policy didn’t happen. I mean you’ve got to go back and look at the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. What was Europe able to do even in the negotiations?
I’m coming. The 7th one is quite easy, that’s the issue that this attempt to subordinate Europe to US interests created all kinds of contradictions. The leading contradiction was energy. I mean the United States and France drove three wars against Iran, effectively a war, against Libya and against Russia. Those are the three sources of piped energy into Europe. These created all kinds of insurmountable contradictions. That’s the 7th thesis. You’ve got to take this very seriously because no exit from it. America cannot fantasize energy into households in Germany. This is going to create a serious problem in the short term, not long term.
And the last point is that look, frankly you’re going to see the United States increasingly find that Europe has because of these contradictions a material necessity of interacting with the rest of Eurasia whether its energy from Russia or it’s the Belt and Road with China. I don’t presume to know as much as Lyle about this but certainly 17 countries in Europe have signed on with China 17+1 into the BRI and many of the countries like Italy signed a BRI MoU, memorandum of understanding. So these contradictions are going to intervene.
My feeling is this war, yes, Russia intervened and that’s bad and whatever. Frankly, the sanctimoniousness of social media and the media itself is meaningless to me because none of these people were so upset when Iraq was destroyed. None of these people were so upset when Libya was destroyed. I’m not prepared to be bullied by the social media sanctimoniousness into crying special tears because this is happening inside Europe. Sorry, not from me. But having set that aside this is not a war about any of these things.
It’s actually in my opinion a contest over whether the United States is going to continue to be able to subordinate Europe and whether Russia and China are going to have some role here right now. They feel they’ve pushed Russia aside but I don’t think this is a permanent situation.
Richard Falk: (21:15)
Thanks. Helena and I found very useful the two prior presentations and picking up on what Vijay said at the very end about the importance of recognizing the Iraq War of 2003 as an important precedent for what is happening in Ukraine. And often international law, when it involves geopolitical actors in the peace and security area, is greatly influenced by the precedent, whether it’s consistent with international law or not, created by the geopolitical actors. This happened with nuclear weapons testing. Once the US tested in the oceans, it was in a very weak position to object to other countries using the oceans for testing nuclear weapons, even though it didn’t want them to, including France. It got into a kind of diplomatic impasse with France at the time. And just one thing from what Lyle said, he talked about the American diplomatic mistakes, that not being consequential in terms of evaluating the suffering imposed on the Ukrainian people, and I agree with that. But it’s more than diplomatic mistakes. It’s the geopolitical atmosphere created by repeated US violations of national sovereignty and disregard of international law. You remember, George W. Bush at the time of the Iraq attack, said the UN would be irrelevant if it didn’t endorse what the US was doing, and it showed a kind of selective defiance.
And one way of interpreting what is the ultimate strategic objective of Putin is to restore the geopolitical balance that existed during the Cold War. You remember the US proclaimed a Unipolar moment, and it has behaved as though it’s the one global security actor and the spheres of influence the other geopolitical actors are disregarded. I’m not in favor of these spheres of influence, but they have been accepted and they are part of the geopolitical level of order which is built into the UN Charter in terms of the veto. The veto in effect tells the geopolitical actors you don’t have to obey international law unless you want to. It’s very permissive and is using the UN as an ideological instrument in this context to condemn Russia for doing what we’ve done all over the world and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. So this is very important, and there are two levels of world order that are often confused. It’s a state centric system in which international law supposedly governs the interstate behavior and is built on pursuit of national interest. And then there’s this geopolitical overlap that has existed ever since the state system emerged, which is that the great powers use force as a matter of discretion and in a way that was preserved, not eliminated by the UN and the UN Charter and contemporary international law.
So it’s very important, in my view, to distinguish this state-centric level of world order and the geopolitical overlay. And that’s what I feel we’re observing in the Ukraine. And just to finish, I would say this doesn’t morally excuse what the Russians are doing in Ukraine or the suffering inflicted on the Ukrainian people. But it’s not different in kind than what the US has inflicted on a series of other countries. And indeed, Iraq was in many ways worse because it had been under twelve years of crippling sanctions prior to the attack, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths during that sanction. And then we mounted this huge attack. So that precedent should be the fact that it was not mentioned in the mainstream media after Biden’s very disappointing State of the Union treatment of these issues, not mentioning the desirability of a ceasefire, even of the Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, not seeing not articulating any kind of exit strategy that would save face for Russia and bring peace to Ukraine. Let me stop there.
Helena Cobban: (27:50)
Does any of the rest of you or Richard see a particular role for the United Nations or for the BRICS group of countries from the global south, or perhaps just for China and India, who is going to lead the diplomacy that will prevent this from escalating, given that clearly the United States is not going to.
Vijay Prashad: (28:54)
You know, I have the highest respect for Antonio Guterres. He’s a very distinguished diplomat, and I’m sure Richard might feel the same or whatever, but when Mr. Guterres said that this is the worst war of this century, again, I just felt this is routine, systematic amnesia about Iraq. It’s almost like they have bought meetings somewhere to decide how to talk about these wars. People sitting outside Europe, outside North America, listening to statements like that, the credibility of the institution is damaged. How can you say it’s the worst war? He actually said that the day that the Russians intervened, the day of the Russian intervention. How could you already say it’s the worst war, Mr. Guterres, that damages the credibility of the institution. Are you going to be a reasonable, neutral actor in this and look at what’s going on and call for perhaps set the table in Belarus for a new discussion, Minsk three or whatever. So the United Nations. I don’t think it’s not possible for the UN to operate the General Assembly resolution that was passed just a few hours ago. It was revealing who voted where. It’s hardly going to move an agenda.
No, BRICS cannot move an agenda at all. It’s not feasible at all. BRICS hasn’t had a really good unified political declaration in a long time. You’ve got to remember that Brazil is governed by Bolsonaro, a man relatively subordinate to Washington. Mr. Modi is also relatively subordinate to Washington except on this issue. But nobody is going to take it seriously if in BRICS, two of the countries are Russia and China. It’s just not going to have credibility here. I think Mr. Putin has to keep calling for some kind of conference. Looking at the way the military has been proceeding, it looks like what the Russians are eager to do is not so much breakaway Eastern Ukraine as to create a land bridge between Crimea and the rest of Russia. That sea bridge going over the Black Sea is not sufficient. They look like they are trying to make a land bridge. That’s a military aim that the Russians probably have. Once they attain that, will they actually sue for peace and say, let’s have a discussion and so on? Do they really want to have a change of government in Kiev? It’s got to be actually between Russia, Ukraine, the Europeans and the Americans. I don’t think any external actor has the credibility I’m afraid.
Helena Cobban: (39:23)
Well, I call myself a visionary realist, and I think that we have to take into account the balance of power kind of things. But I’m always searching for ways to get beyond the current situation, one in which US government aggressions are completely unpunished, Israeli aggressions are completely unpunished, and then along comes Ukraine. I mean, I think there has been a lot of discussion in much of the global south about the fact that people don’t seem to hurt according to Western dominated media, unless they are white people. You can see Syrians and Afghans and Palestinians and Libyans hurting and hurting and hurting, but their stories are not put on the front page in the same way until you have little blonde Ukrainian girls, one of whom, as it happened, was the Palestinian young activist, Ahed Tamimi, who happens to be blonde, and she got recategorized as a winsome Ukrainian victim. I mean, it’s hard for all of us who have all of us with our human empathy and human feelings not to see that the suffering obviously is terrible, but it’s terrible, whatever the color of people’s skins, whatever their religion.
Vijay Prashad: (41:01)
Can I say something about, associated with the point Richard made about, you know, look at the world we live in. Let’s just breathe this in. I covered the Libya war. I was in Benghazi and then in Tripoli. A breakaway faction of a sovereign country, Libya, led by a man who was the financial advisor of the Sheikh of Qatar’s Wife, Mahmoud Jibril, declares that it wants independence. First they talk about Eastern independence, a breakaway province, Eastern Libya calls out to the west, come and help us. A philosopher runs headstrong into the conflict from France, makes a phone call to the French, and the French get a UN resolution and start to pummel and bomb Tripoli to smithereens, destroying Libya. What’s the difference between what NATO did in Libya and what the Russians are now doing in Ukraine? Can somebody explain to me the difference? It strikes me it’s identical. There are people in the Donbas region saying, help us, we want to break away. We are suffering the oppression, genocide from Kiev. They call upon the world community. The Russians show up and start bombing. Okay. They didn’t seek a UN Security Council resolution. Perhaps they should have.
Perhaps they should have made more about that ethnic cleansing in the Eastern provinces. Again, I’m not justifying what Russia is doing. I think the war is appalling. On the other hand, what’s the difference between what the Russians are doing in Ukraine and what the west did to Libya? The only difference is a piece of paper called UN Resolution 1973. And let me just say something about UN Resolution 1973. Actually, the west violated UN Resolution 1973 because the UN resolution merely said a no fly zone. The West started to act as Mahmoud Jibril’s air force. So much so that when the African Union delegation went to Tripoli in the middle of the war, Gaddafi said, I will have a ceasefire. Let’s go and have talks. And then the African Union group went to Benghazi and they sat with Mahmoud Jibril and others, and Jibril and others said, we don’t want to have a ceasefire because we’re winning. We’re going to defeat Gaddafi. So that’s a violation of UN Resolution 1973. In fact, if you accept that the NATO countries violated the UN resolution, there’s no difference to me between the NATO war in Libya and the Russian war in Ukraine.
And yet the world is incensed by what’s happening in Ukraine and nobody cares a fake about the destruction of a noble country like Libya, destroyed now, where slavery has returned and continues to be there. By the way, it’s not just that it was revealed and so on continues to be there in Northern Libya. I was in Sabha in the south of Libya, a barbaric situation there, where the French Foreign Legion has reestablished itself. What is this, the 19th century where the French Foreign Legion has bases and is patrolling Sabha, Libya? And the Americans have the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger. And nobody cares at all. Why? Because it’s Africa, friends. And in Africa, this is all allowed. In Europe, it is not allowed. Go back and read Aime Cesaire’s 1950 Discourse on Colonialism.
Richard Falk: (47:41)
Yes, an interesting question that points to an obvious institutional reality that reflects geopolitics. In other words, the ICC is very responsive when the issue involves something the west is concerned about. And it had been in its early years, mainly African abuses of state power, and it’s been notoriously resistant to addressing Israeli crimes and US crimes in Afghanistan. And it points to institutional double standards, which I think has been underlying much of what we’ve been saying, that the UN itself behaves differently with Ukraine then it does with either the Palestinian agenda or with the Iraqi agenda back in 2003. We’re living in a world of squares. The US is fighting to maintain hegemonic geopolitics, and Russia and China are trying to create what might be called symmetrical geopolitics. And in my view, that’s the deepest way of understanding what are the larger strategic stakes of what’s happening in Ukraine and indirectly, what’s happening in The Hague as far as the ICC is concerned.
Richard Falk: (55:46)
Just one word to this interesting dialogue. I think there’s a better argument for saying that the Russians are being prudent, not paranoid in view of their own history. This historical experience is within the lifetime of the leadership of Russia. They suffered terribly during World War II more than any other nation. And to see this process, you mentioned the Kennan version, who knew the Russian consciousness, had experienced so directly. Before talking about Russian paranoia, one should talk or at least simultaneously about NATO provocations and the two things are fused. It seems to me we’re operating in a context where what is at stake is this international discourse which has been so one sided. And as Vijay pointed out, this General Assembly resolution shows the extent to which the west controls the discourse even within the US. And it got most of the countries in the global south to go along with this discourse. So there are a lot of issues involved here, it seems to me.
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