By Philip Giraldi
November 29, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--
In history books as
well as in politics every story is shaped by
where one chooses to begin the tale. The
current fighting in Ukraine, which many
observers believe to already be what might
be considered the opening phase of World War
3, is just such a development. Did the seeds
of conflict arise subsequent to Russian
leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991
after having received a commitment from the
United States and its allies not to advance
the West’s military alliance NATO into
Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was
quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton,
who intervened militarily in the former
Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members
from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.
Since that time NATO
has continued its expansion at the expense
of Russian national security interests.
Ukraine, as one of the largest of the former
Soviet republics, soon became the focal
point for potential conflict. The US
interfered openly in Ukrainian politics,
featuring frequent visits by relentlessly
hawkish Senator John McCain and State
Department monster Victoria Nuland as well
as the investment of a reported $5 billion
to destabilize the situation, bringing about
regime change to remove the pro-Russian
government of Viktor Yanukovich and replace
it with a regime friendly to America and its
European allies. When this occurred it
inevitably led to a proposed invitation to
Ukraine to join NATO, a move which Moscow
repeatedly warned would constitute an
existential threat to Russia itself.
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Finally, Moscow tried
assiduously to negotiate a solution to the
developing Ukraine crisis in 2020-2021 but
the US and its allies were not interested,
allowing the corrupt Ukrainian government of
Volodymyr Zelensky to refuse any
accommodation. So Russia itself has
perceived that it has been misled or even
lied to repeatedly by the US and its allies.
It has been particularly vexed by the
looting of its natural resources by mostly
Western oligarchs operating under protection
afforded by the feckless President Boris
Yeltsin between 1991 and 1999, a puppet
installed and sustained through US and
European interference in the Russian
elections. Just when Russia was on its
knees, perhaps intentionally, there arrived
on the scene in 1999 former KGB officer
Vladimir Putin who, as Prime Minister and
later president, proceeded to clean house.
Ever since that time, Putin has very
carefully explained himself and what he has
been doing, making clear that he is no enemy
of the West but rather a partner in a
relationship that respects the interests and
cultures of all players in a global economy
that maximizes freedom and individuality.
Given the danger of
dramatic escalation of the current situation
in Ukraine, with talk coming from both sides
about the conditions for the use of nuclear
weapons, an October 27th speech made by
President Vladimir Putin at the 19th
meeting of the Valdai International
Discussion Club, held near Moscow, should be
required reading for the Joe Bidens and Jens
Stoltenbergs of this world. The
theme of the meeting was A
Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security
for Everyone. The four day-long session
included 111 academics, politicians,
diplomats and economists from Russia and 40
foreign countries, including Afghanistan,
Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany,
India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, South
Africa, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the United
States. In his speech, Putin laid out his
vision of a multipolar world in which there
is no concept of a politically hegemonic
“rules based world order” which substitutes
“rules for international law.” And, he
observed, the rules have themselves been
regularly dictated by one country or group
of countries. Putin instead urged a
transition into a willingness to accept that
all countries have interests and rights that
should be respected.
Interestingly enough,
Putin, since assuming leadership of his
country, has been unwavering in his demand
that all countries in the world be granted
respect, by which he means that local
interests and cultures must be considered
legitimate and worthy of acceptance by all
as long as they permit individual freedom
and are similarly respectful of the
interests and national traits of others.
A relaxed and jocular
Putin spoke for over an hour in his opening
remarks and then fielded questions for
another two and a half hours from the
audience. In response to a question, he
assessed the sanity of White House advisers
who would “spoil relations with China at
the same time they are supplying
billions-worth of weapons to Ukraine in a
fight against Russia… Frankly, I do not know
why they are doing this…Are they sane? It
seems that this runs completely counter to
common sense and logic… This is simply
crazy!”
The Russian president
emphasized
several points which elaborated his
views. First, he observed that US/Western
hegemony “denies the sovereignty of
countries and peoples, their identity and
uniqueness, and disregards any interests of
other states… [The] rules-based world order”
only empowers those making the “rules.”
Everyone else must obey or face the
consequences.
Putin also decried
the West’s tendency to make rules and then
ignore them when circumstances change. He
noted how economic sanctions and “cancel
culture” are being used cynically to weaken
local economies while also demeaning the
cultures and national traits of foreign
adversaries. He observed, for example, how
Russian writers and composers are being
banned purely to send a political message
and punish Moscow for its foreign policy.
Putin explained that
Russia is an “independent, original
civilization” which “has never
considered itself an enemy of the West.”
Moscow “simply defends its right to
exist and develop freely. At the same time,
we ourselves are not seeking to become some
kind of new hegemon.” He then provided
his analysis of what it developing, saying
that the world is confronting a global storm
which no one can ignore. “We are
standing at a historic milestone, ahead of
what is probably the most dangerous,
unpredictable and at the same time important
decade since the end of World War II. The
West is not able to single-handedly manage
humanity, but is desperately trying to do
it, and most of the peoples of the world no
longer want to put up with it.” We can
decide “either to continue to accumulate
a burden of problems that will inevitably
crush us all, or to try together to find
solutions, albeit imperfect, but working,
capable of making our world safer and more
stable.”
So, Vladimir Putin is
issuing a call to arms for a transition to a
multipolar world, which will inevitably
change the playing field both in
international relations and in the global
economy. No longer will the United States
and its allies be able to claim “rule of
law” when using coercive force to punish
competitors. The drift away from using
dollars as the world’s reserve currency,
mostly for energy transactions, is already
taking place as major trading partners like
India, China and NATO member Turkey have
ignored restrictions while continuing to buy
up Russian energy exports, negating to a
certain extent the sanctions put in place by
Washington and Europe. The death of dollars
as the reserve currency will make it more
difficult for the US Treasury to print money
without any backing as many nations will no
longer be willing to accept what will be
increasingly seen as a fiat currency
produced by a government that is actually
drowning in debt.
Putin might, of
course, be proven wrong and the current
global system might well be able to limp
along for the foreseeable future. But if he
is right, those developments transitioning
into a multipolar world would mean a de
facto decline and fall of the United
States as the world hegemon while anything
even remotely like a dollar collapse would
have catastrophic effect on the US import
driven economy as well as on ordinary
Americans. Some kind of partial default on
US Treasury debt is not unimaginable. And
Putin might well be right in his prediction
that the change is coming and there is
nothing that the United States and its
friends can do to stop it.
In any event, the
political and economic adjustments that are
certainly coming in one way or another will
certainly play out as the Ukraine conflict
continues to simmer. The tragedy is that
what is developing is self-inflicted,
completely avoidable and unresponsive to any
actual United States interest, but that is
another story. If Ukraine turns to open
warfare with more direct US involvement and
economic dislocation, international pressure
to dismantle the post-World War 2 status quo
will inevitably increase. No matter how it
develops, what is occurring right now will
force the perennially tone-deaf politicians
in and around the White House to begin to
rethink America’s place in the world and its
options as a major power. No one can predict
how that will go and the process will make
compelling theater as America’s two major
political parties take up positions to make
the case that the other party is solely at
fault. It is impossible to foresee how far
that bloodletting will go.
Philip M. Giraldi,
Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council
for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax
deductible educational foundation (Federal
ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA
20134 and its email is
inform@cnionline.org.
