BY David Gordon

How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How US and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe

by Benjamin Abelow

Siland Press; 75 pp.

The Ukraine war has generated great controversy, but of one point there can be no doubt, and Benjamin Abelow, a physician with a longstanding interest in public affairs, has properly emphasized this in his brief and excellent book. The policy of the United States toward the war, and more generally toward the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, has been one of direct confrontation rather than peaceful accommodation. It is hardly a surprise that supporters of a noninterventionist policy have criticized the United Sates for this, but a number of those in the foreign policy “establishment” have done so as well, and Abelow has been able to secure the endorsement of some of these for his book. Jack Matlock Jr., for example, the last American ambassador to the Soviet Union, writes that the book is a “brilliant, remarkably concise explanation of the danger that U.S. and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] military involvement in Ukraine has created.”

The split in the foreign policy establishment raises a question. What exactly is the objection of these dissenters to current US policy in the Ukraine? It cannot be just that it is an “activist” foreign policy, as they do not reject in principle America’s role as a global superpower. It is rather that American policy makers have gone too far, and in doing so disregarded a fundamental fact; viz., that a friendly Ukraine is not a vital national interest for the United States, but it is one for Russia. Russia perceives a hostile Ukraine as an “existential” threat, and if the US continues massively to oppose Russia, this could lead to nuclear war, with disastrous consequences.

Abelow states the essential point in this way:

Even from a blinkered American perspective, the whole Western plan was a dangerous game of bluff, enacted for reasons that are hard to fathom. Ukraine is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a vital security interest of the United States. In fact, Ukraine hardly matters at all…. In contrast, for Russia—with its 1,200-mile shared border and its history of three major land-route invasions from the West, the most recent of which, during World War II, caused the death of roughly 13 percent of the entire Russian population—Ukraine is the most vital of national interests. (pp. 60–61, emphasis removed)

One might be inclined to object: Even if Abelow is correct, isn’t it the case that Putin bears primary responsibility for the current crisis owing to his military incursion, which has for its goal the return of a good part, if not all, of the Ukraine to Russian sovereignty? Suppose that this were true, although as I shall endeavor to show, it is in fact false. It is irrelevant to the point to which Abelow has drawn our attention. Even if Putin’s responsibility for the war were total, it would not weaken the inescapable fact that an aggressive US policy risks nuclear war over what is an existential threat to Russia but not to America. We may go further. Even if Putin wishes to restore Russia to the position it held before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, his success in doing so would still pose no direct threat to the security of the United States.

In fact, though, it isn’t the case that Putin bears primary responsibility for the crisis. Abelow with characteristic concision gets to the heart of the matter:

The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war. These provocations placed Russia in an untenable situation, for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution. (p. 7)

Abelow documents his thesis to the hilt, placing great emphasis on the promise of the United States to refrain from expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders. Supporters of current US policy have countered by pointing out that the United States made no written commitment to this effect, but this is a mere technicality, and the weight of the evidence supports the Russian view of the question.

In describing this episode, I am not suggesting that Western assurances were legally binding, or that the violation of these assurances fully explains Russia’s invasion of Ukraine … I simply want to note that the West acted in a way calculated to deceive Moscow, and this episode laid the foundation for the evolving Russian sense that NATO, and the United States in particular, could not be trusted. (p. 12)

In the years since this broken promise, the US has continued a policy of provocation and hostility.

In late 2013 and early 2014, anti-government protests occurred in Independence Square in Kiev. These protests, which were supported by the United States, were subverted by violent provocateurs. The violence culminated in a coup in which armed, far-right Ukrainian ultra-nationalists took over government buildings and forced the democratically-elected pro-Russian president to flee the country. (p. 15)

It soon afterward came to light that Virginia Nuland, a neoconservative warmonger of long standing, and some of her colleagues had a hand in these developments.

As if this were not enough, the United States has again and again stated an intention to admit the Ukraine to NATO, in the face of Putin’s repeated declarations that this would be an intolerable state of affairs for Russia.

It would be a serious mistake to discount Abelow as unduly pro-Russian in his sympathies. The efforts he supports to secure a peaceful settlement by making concessions to Russia are in the best interests of the Ukrainians themselves, even those hostile to Russia. True friends of Ukraine should not send vast amounts of military aid to the intransigent Zelensky regime: that is the way to what Kant in another context aptly calls the peace of the graveyard.

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

READ MORE:

https://mises.org/wire/review-how-west-brought-war-ukraine

READ FROM TOP.

UKRAINE HAS BEEN REBORN AS A NAZI COUNTRY — MINUS CRIMEA AND THE DONBASS REGION. THESE AREAS OF "UKRAINE" ADDED IN 1922 AND 1954 UNDER THE COMMUNIST REGIME OF THE USSR, ARE NOT UKRAINIAN PER SE. THEY DECLARED INDEPENDENT AUTONOMY, THEN COUNTRY-HOOD, BECAUSE THE KIEV REGIME BECAME DESPOTIC, TYRANNICAL, FASCIST, DICTATORIAL AND AUTOCRATIC TOWARDS THE LARGE POPULATION OF RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE. ZELENSKY IS LIKE HITLER, BUT HE IS LESS INTELLIGENT AND MORE STUPID.

THE ONLY PEACEFUL SOLUTION TO THE LEGIT RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IS TO DIVIDE UKRAINE LIKE THE UK DID WITH THE IRISH, BACK IN THE 1920S. ON ONE SIDE THE GALICIANS, ON THE OTHER THE RUSSIANS. THE OTHER SOLUTION WHICH THE RUSSIANS DO NOT WANT TO DO, WOULD BE TO ANNIHILATE THE UKRAINIAN REGIME.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW............................

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut Western audiences off from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek‘s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly untrue”—a determination that did more to confirm the ideological strictures of US media than to debunk them.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was removed from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 3/1/22) Google News (Reuters, 3/1/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 3/2/22) in the United States and/or Europe. RT and Sputnik (another Russian state–funded network) were removed from the Apple app store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).

Microsoft banned RT from the Windows app store, and deranked RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 3/1/22). Google (Reuters, 3/1/22), Meta (Reuters 2/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22) barred RT from receiving any ad revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).

Motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances,” in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the US had to close down their production completely (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

PayPal has recently frozen the accounts of independent news outlets such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances around PayPal’s actions are less clear than with the actions against RT. The editor-in-chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, said he didn’t know why PayPal froze its account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “purveying misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).

One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of commentary by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges (who formerly worked for the New York Times and NPR) because it was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!, 4/1/22).

In May, the US announced new sanctions against Russian television networks Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from US advertisers.

Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and a renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by the “information war” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with actor Russell Brand (YouTube, 7/22/22):

Take the United States today; it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.

Chomsky’s comments were “factchecked” recently by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:

While the BBC and Radio Free America did broadcast in Russia post-WWII and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access that the Russian public did have was gained in spite of, not thanks to, their government’s efforts.

The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments made by Chomsky, concluding:

To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens in Soviet Russia is therefore, not only clearly untrue, but an argument that neglects the sacrifices and perils that journalists have endured to deliver accurate news about the country, and continue to endure to this day.

The official ruling of Newsweek declared Chomsky’s comments false:

By all accounts, Americans are able to access news from Russia despite many Western journalists having fled the country, and Russia having blocked its public’s access to most Western social media and news platforms.

One of the articles used to support the certification of falsehood was a New York Times article (5/26/87) from 1987 that reported “Russia had begun broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years.” A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.

Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’” And similarly, from the same BBC article cited by Newsweek:

However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.

Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the factchecker, it seems that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is fairly consistent with Chomsky’s comments: “Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.”

Newsweek reached out to Chomsky for comment, who responded:

I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it with pre-Perestroika Russia when Russians were getting their news from BBC and VoA, according to US studies.

A collection of studies were published in 2010 in the book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former research fellow at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (US-funded media), and R. Eugene Parta, also a former director of RFE and a contributor to the Hoover Institution. The studies corroborate the claim that people in the Soviet Union were frequently listening to Western media.

In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT put VoA weekly listenership reaching highs of 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC topping out at 11%. “Study results showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the USSR urban population listened to foreign broadcasting more or less regularly,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/31/factchecking-the-factchecker-on-chomsky-russia-and-media-access/

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW..................