Ukraine: Russia resists NATO trap

An adventure, for sure! But to what end?

Joe Biden had an arduous 10-hour train ride through Ukraine into Kyiv to become the first American president ever to venture into a war zone not under American occupation or control. The Ukrainian capital had been under continual Russian bombardment.

Before Biden entered Ukraine, though, Washington had alerted Moscow about his visit. So it was actually a low-risk high drama.

The event that highlighted his Eastern European trip was a speech he gave on Tuesday to nine members of Eastern NATO countries. In it the president declared that he was there to show American support not only for Ukraine but also for “freedom of democracy at large.”

“Democracies of the world,” he asserted, “will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever. …  There is no sweeter word than freedom.  There is no nobler goal than freedom.  There is no higher aspiration than freedom…. What is at stake here is freedom.”

In fact the project to disseminate freedom and democracy is what had, ostensibly, propelled America into the defense of Ukraine and, for that matter, NATO’s unbridled expansion that triggered the Ukraine-Russia war. Critics have, however, called that mission an “empire-building” one (journalist Elizabeth Drew was the first used the phrase).

That mission had been conceived in the 1970s by a group of American intellectuals who abhorred traditional American conservatism and also the Vietnam-era pacifism and leftist radicalism. Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz,  Donald Kagan and others were wedded to different concepts of liberal democracy, and they believed that America should go about promoting freedom and democracy in the world.

A second generation of intellectuals and activists who shared their views also were committed to market capitalism, and they believed, moreover, that it was America’s historic destiny to disseminate this ideology through, if need be, the use of military power. Hence they also espoused U.S. military and economic dominance over the world. The leading lights of these “neoconservatives,” as they came to be known, included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), David Wurmser, Frederick Kagan (son of Donald) and Elliott Abrams.

The demise of Soviet communism and the unraveling of Eastern European Communist states convinced the neocons of the veracity of their views and got them excited about their mission, which became a major topic of American intellectual and media discourse in the early 1990s.

In their writings and talk show appearances the neocons argued that a democratized world would be one of peace because democracies, in their view, would never go to war against one another. Democracy, according them, was also an antidote to terrorism because 9/11 and other acts of Muslim terrorism stemmed from “the almost complete absence of democracy in the Middle East.”

The neocons formalized their agenda in a rendezvous in 1996 in which they adopted what was called the Project New American Century (PNAC). Most of them Jewish, the PNAC prepared a report for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on resolving Israel’s security challenges based on the use of Western ideas and American military force. One of their specific prescriptions was to overthrow the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, then the most vocal Arab leader against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get Presidents George HW Bush (Papa Bush) and Bill Clinton to get Saddam knocked off.

Spreading freedom

Wolfowitz became secretary to then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the Papa Bush administration and he got Cheney imbued with the idea of empire-building through the neocon mission. Their big moment came when George W. Bush (Baby Bush) – a totally blank slate in foreign affairs – was elected president in 2000. Cheney became the head of the Baby Bush transition team and he and Wolfowitz stuffed the new administration with a host of diehard neoconservatives.

As always, the American foreign policy establishment and news media had little grounding in trans-Mediterranean societies, especially Muslim societies. They were mostly mesmerized by the neoconservative ideas of spreading freedom and democracy in the Arab world.  Leading neocons, especially Perle and Wolfowitz, became a feature on American TV talk shows. I was among a minority in the American news media who, while believing in freedom and democracy in general, were skeptical about spreading these ideas through the use of military power. I was also concerned about liberal democracy’s market economic version, which spawned economic injustice and inequality. I believed, too, that in order for  political institutions to work they needed to evolve in each society and adapt to its cultural environment.

On the morning of Dec. 10, 2002, an audience at the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) auditorium in Washington was waiting for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (now president of Turkey), to give a speech.  I had been scheduled  to  interview the Turkish leader after his speech, after which he would go on to meet Baby Bush at the White House. Wolfowitz, then U.S. deputy defense secretary, entered the room, flanked by three or four other people, and nearly half the room burst into applause.

A man in his mid-50s, wearing a blue jacket and a solid red tie, was sitting next to me in the second row. He asked another person who this acclaimed visitor was but didn’t get an answer. When he turned to me and asked the same question, I whispered light-heartedly: “He’s going to start a democratic revolution in the Muslim world. Paul Wolfowitz.”

The man gave me a dirty look. “Do you have a problem with having a democratic revolution in the Muslim world?” he shot back.  The neocon mission to spread freedom and democracy in the world had become quite popular in America.

The neocons saw 9/11 as a golden opportunity to launch their project. Saddam was an Arab dictator among a half-dozen others. His harsh rule included the brutal suppression of a secessionist Kurdish uprising in the mid-1970s with the support of then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With the help of zealous American media, the Baby Bush administration anointed Saddam an Arab “Hitler” and a stumbling block to the democratization of Iraq.  They also accused the Iraqi leader of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having links to Mohammad Ata, one of the 9/11 terrorists. All these charges would eventually prove concocted and blatantly false.

As president-elect, Baby Bush had appointed Cheney the head of his transition team. Cheney and his one-time secretary Wolfowitz crowded the new administration with neocons. The neocons got Baby Bush and his national security adviser (later secretary of state), Condoleezza Rice, excited about democratizing Iraq and through it the Muslim Middle East and eventually much of the rest of the world.

“Iraqi democracy will succeed,” Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union address, “and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.” Not just that, the president added that “the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

In Iraq, Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and mostly Sunni Kurds were the major contenders for power. The latter two groups collaborated with the American invaders to replace Saddam’s Sunni Arab regime. As Sunni Arabs resisted the U.S. invasion, the Americans got the Iraqi military and bureaucracy cleansed of  most Sunni Arab elements, who were also subjected Shiite Arab pogrom in many Shiite-majority areas. A group of youth from among these persecuted Sunni Arabs launched the anti-U.S. terrorist outfit called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Meanwhile, on Oct. 26, 2003, Wolfowitz paid a visit to Baghdad to see for himself the outcome of his “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The U.S. deputy defense secretary was greeted by a group of Sunni Arab guerrillas with some 20 rockets fired from a home-made launcher at Al Rasheed Hotel, where he was staying. One 11th-floor room of the hotel was destroyed. Part of the ceiling collapsed. A door was blown off. And smoke engulfed part of the hotel. As hotel staff and American security personnel hurried him out of the hotel, Wolfowitz declared in a shaken voice: “These terrorist attacks will not deter us from completing our mission.”

The mission to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy remains unfulfilled. The invasion and a decade-long American occupation has pretty much unraveled the Iraqi state. The three Kurdish-majority northern provinces have all but seceded from the state, and the rest of the state reels from the belligerency of multiple Iraqi and Iranian guerrilla groups. Nearly 1 million Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans perished in the Iraq during the war, which has become a Shiite pseudo-theocracy.

In 2003, as America’s war raged in Afghanistan (as also in Iraq), I had a conversation with the neocon Zalmay Khalidzad, an immigrant from Afghanistan whom I had met at the Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank.  (Khalidzad would later become the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.) He had been among the signatories to a letter the neocons had written to Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam.

I reminded Khalidzad that his native Afghanistan had been an extremely backward county, which had never tried democracy. Could the Afghans work out “liberal democracy” the neocons’ professed mission? I asked.

“It may take some time,” he replied. “But there should be no problem, really. The America will always support them.” The Americans have returned home, being soundly defeated by the Taliban, which they had overthrown, and Afghanistan has revived its old obscurantist Islamic theocracy.

Ukraine imbroglio

Among those who were alarmed by the neocon agenda to democratize the world through the American military might were the Russians, especially  Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Soviet leaders joined their European and American counterparts to decide a reunified Germany’s niche in the world. East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow wanted a reunified Germany to be a neutral state unattached to any security bloc. Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduzard Schevardnaze, were skeptical of the idea. The havoc wreaked by Nazi Germany to Russia during World War II was fresh in their minds. They wanted the new, unified Germany to become part of a multi-state security structure. West Germany had been a NATO member, but when NATO wanted the reunified state to retain the membership of the alliance, they balked. They were concerned that the Western defense alliance might begin to expand eastward to countries that had been in the Russian sphere of influence.

Gorbachev sought an assurance from the Western leaders against NATO’s eastward expansion as a condition for Germany’s inclusion into the alliance. A host of Western statesmen, including Papa Bush and then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave him that assurance. “Not one inch eastward,” declared James Baker III, Bush’s secretary of state, on Feb. 9, 1990.

In the ensuing neoconservative hullabaloo about the democratization of the world and expansion of the  American hegemony the commitment given to the Russians was forgotten. NATO began to rake in one cluster of Eastern European countries in 1999 and then another in 2004. In April 2008, at its Bucharest summit, the Western military alliance declared that it would next bring in Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow was alarmed. The two countries are at Russia’s doorsteps and the Russians saw the proposal as a Western scheme encircle Russia militarily. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the move “a direct threat to Russia.”

As NATO ignored his warning, Putin, in 2014, invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula and also the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Both territories are inhabited by a plurality of Russians, who had been agitating for political and cultural autonomy. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched last February, is intended to prevent Ukraine’s accession to NATO.

This past Tuesday, when Biden – a Cold War retiree committed to the neocon mission – vowed to spread freedom and democracy; Putin, in Moscow, reminded the Russians that the war in Ukraine was not about Ukraine, but “about Russia’s national security.” He vowed to continue the war as long as it took. He declared, specifically, that Russia would hold on to the Donbass region and help the Russian-speaking people there to continue “fighting, defending their right to live on their own land, to speak their native language.” I can’t imagine Putin, or any other Russian leader, returning Donbas, let alone Crimea, to Ukraine again.

It’s hard to believe that the war can be sustained very long. Ukraine has lost 100,000 lives in the war. About  16 million Ukrainians have been uprooted from their homes. Up to 18 million Ukrainians, 40 percent of the of the country’s population, will need some sort of humanitarian aid in the coming months.

According to the World Bank, Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and as many as 60 percent of Ukrainians are expected to end up below the poverty line.

The Russian economy is 10 times that of Ukraine. The cost of the war to Russia is minor in comparison. Indeed the Russian government has sought to project a business-as-usual picture of life for the average Russian citizen. The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its estimate of Russia’s economy, and now predicts a fall of GDP this year of only 3.4%, compared with an estimated drop of 8.5% in April this year.

Ukraine is carrying on its war mainly with Western arms and money – worth $40 billion worth so far, $30 billion of which from the United States. Meanwhile, Europe is reaching the limits to its military and financial support Ukraine. The Biden administration is pretty much the main source of support for Ukraine. But the administration is leery about escalating the military support, fearing provoking Russia into using nukes or getting into a direct conflict with the United States.

On top of it all, the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives,  are already resisting  U.S. aid to Ukraine. And both major Republican presidential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, are vocally opposed to further U.S. commitment to the Ukraine war.

At some point, the parties have to talk seriously about peace. China and India are sending feelers for that. While Ukraine and America have announced that complete withdrawal of all Russian troops for Donbas – and even Crimea – is a precondition for peace negotiations, that would be a non-starter for the Russians.

To end the war, whenever that happens, the Ukrainians will face a choice: To cede the Russians at least part of Donbas and forget about Crimea; or let Russia wreck their country, leaving the rest of it independent, democratic, and maybe part of NATO.

That would, of copurse, be a better outcome for the neocons than that of their 20-year-long war in Afghanistan. They’ve lost all of that country to the Taliban, who have turned it into the world’s most radical theocracy! Jeffrey Sachs (“probably the most important economist in the world,” Time.) has called Ukraine “the latest neocon disaster.”

• Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator.